Biden will extend overtime protections to 1 million workers

President Biden is extending overtime protections to 1 million workers who earn less than the average individual wage and promises to take more action if he is re-elected.

The executive action announced Monday will extend protections to workers who earn less than $43,888 a year, the White House said in a statement.

“That means higher wages and more time with family for millions of Americans,” Biden said.

The president has promised to further extend protections next year if Democrats keep the White House, increasing overtime benefits for 3 million additional workers with an increased cap of $58,656 — an amount that exceeds the average individual salary of U.S. $47,960, as specified in Census data. .

The new overtime extensions, which take effect Monday, stem from a rule finalized in April in a section of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The changes are the result of an update Department of Labor Calculation.

Democrats’ rule changes are expected to increase every three years starting in 2025, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su said in a statement.

Low-income workers saw their wages rise faster in the aftermath of the pandemic than the national average, a phenomenon known as “wage compression” that gave workers more freedom and was first identified by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts.

“Wage compression was accompanied by rapid growth in nominal wages and increasing job separations – especially among young non-college workers (high school graduates or less),” the report said. researchers discovered.

Rising wages for the lowest earners may have had an effect on the 2022 midterm elections, which many analysts thought would result in a “red wave” of important victories for Republicans. Instead, Democrats retained the Senate, while Republicans narrowly won the House.

While the economy was a major issue in 2022 as inflation soared to a nearly 9% annual increase, experts noted that rising wages and more favorable working conditions may have translated into votes for the Democrats.

“[Many voters] They were better off than they were two years ago, so the electoral impact was minimal,” Matt Darling, an employment policy researcher at the Niskanen Center, told The Hill in 2022.

The political announcement follows a presidential debate on Thursday that rattled many Democrats and led to panic throughout the party’s ranks, according to multiple media reports.

Biden calls himself one of the most pro-labor presidents in US history, being the first to join an active picket line with the United Auto Workers union in their strike last year at the Big Three US automakers.

While Biden has supported the expiration of the Trump-era tax cuts, individual provisions of which are set to expire at the end of next year, he has also pledged not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.

This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story