President Biden has extended overtime protections to 1 million workers making below the average wage and has vowed to take further steps if re-elected.
The White House said in a statement that the executive order announced Monday extends protections to workers making less than $43,888 a year.
“For millions of Americans, this means a higher paycheck and more time to spend with their families,” Biden said.
The president has pledged to further expand protections next year if Democrats keep the White House, boosting overtime pay for an additional 3 million workers and raising the threshold to $58,656, above the median individual salary of $47,960 as determined by census data.
The new overtime extensions that take effect Monday stem from rules finalized in April under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The changes were updated Ministry of Labor calculations.
The Democrats’ rule changes would be spread out every three years starting in 2025, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su said in a statement.
Wages for low-income workers have risen faster than the national average since the pandemic, a phenomenon called “wage compression” that gives workers more freedom and was first identified by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts.
“Wage compression has been accompanied by rapid nominal wage increases and increased job attrition, especially among younger non-college workers (those with a high school education or less),” the report said. The researchers.
The rise in wages for low-income earners may have had an impact on the 2022 midterm elections, in which many forecasters predicted a “red wave” of Republican landslide victories. Instead, Democrats retained the Senate and Republicans narrowly won the House of Representatives.
With inflation surging to nearly 9% annually, the economy was the biggest challenge in 2022, but experts said rising wages and improved working conditions may have led to votes for Democrats.
“[Many voters] “The situation is better than it was two years ago, so the electoral backlash has been minimal,” Matt Darling, an employment policy fellow at the Niskanen Center think tank, told The Hill in 2022.
The policy announcement comes in the wake of the president’s performance at Thursday’s debate, which unsettled many Democrats and sparked panic within the party, according to multiple media reports.
Biden has cast himself as one of the most pro-labor presidents in U.S. history and last year he first joined the United Auto Workers’ active picket lines during the union’s strike against the nation’s former Big Three automakers.
Biden supports letting Trump-era tax cuts expire, individual provisions of which are set to expire at the end of next year, but he has promised not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 a year.
