Will The Republicans Impeach Obama If He Moves Unilaterally To Stop Wage Theft?

The poll last week by NBC and the Wall Street Journal confirmed that most Americans support a progressive vision of our country beyond what the fractured, sclerotic Beltway Establishment Democrats have the guts to push-- and on another planet from the reactionary Republican vision of a mean, crabbed country divided in perpetual class war. 82% want to lower the cost of student debt. 75% want to spend more money on infrastructure. 65% want to raise the minimum wage. 59% support addressing climate change by limiting carbon emissions. Conservatives and Wall Street whores oppose all of these things. Only a third of Americans back the conservative push to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69 and only 41% want the Federal government to stop funding Obamacare, core Republican agenda items backed by more than a few from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

There isn't much President Obama can do to do about the progressive things, although it's likely he'll veto two years worth of Republican efforts to further annihilate the middle class with their Koch-inspired ideological extremism. But there is another piece of the progressive puzzle that Obama can and should move on unilaterally, one that has widespread support from the American people: overtime pay. "With a stroke of the pen," wrote venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, "President Obama can make sure you get what you earned, without any congressional action at all. If it feels like you're struggling harder than your parents did, working longer hours for less money, it's because you are. Meanwhile, a handful of capitalists like me are growing wealthy beyond our parents' wildest dreams."

When I first got into the workforce, over 65% of salaried workers earned overtime pay-- today, just 11% do. Overtime was a fact of life... a good fact of life and I used to relish those awesome time-and-a-half bumps in my paychecks when they came. Now workers are looking an an entirely different phenomenon, wage theft, "which occurs when an employer withholds pay rightfully earned by an hourly worker. It happens in a variety of ways, from not paying for overtime, to denying mandated breaks, to subtracting hours from employees' weekly total."

A recent poll commissioned by labor group Fast Food Forward estimates that a stunning 89 percent of fast-food workers have experienced at least one form of wage theft. A previous study, conducted in the first half of 2008 before the recession, found 68 percent of low-wage workers had been victims of wage theft in their previous work week, and estimated that wage theft cost workers an average of $2,634 annually.

...Wage theft can become increasingly common in times of high unemployment, experts say. "When people are desperate for jobs, they're afraid to risk them by taking on their boss," said Ross Eisenbrey, of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

And because the amounts of wages being withheld are often small, it can be hard for a low-wage worker to find an attorney willing to take their case.

For their part, fast-food managers are under "tremendous pressure" to keep labor costs low, especially when sales are sluggish, said Nelson Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Companies may also engage in the practice when the risk of getting caught is low. There aren't nearly enough U.S. Department of Labor investigators to enforce the laws, said Gebreselassie. He added, "The chance any worksite will be investigated is miniscule."

Nevertheless, the issue of wage theft has been getting increased attention in recent months. In March, the owner of seven McDonald's restaurants in New York was ordered to pay almost $500,000 to more than 1,000 employees who performed work off the clock and had other pay illegally withheld.

Now back to our friendly, enlightened capitalist Nick Hanauer and his suggestion to President Obama to remedy this without letting conservatives stand in the way. He;s working with DFA, which has a petition you can sign if you agree. Hanauer wants the Department of Labor to simply raise the overtime threshold to $69,000. In other words, if you earn $69,000 or less, the law would require that you be paid time-and-a-half for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Hanauer:

That would mean 10.4 million middle-class Americans with more money in your pockets or more time to spend with friends and family. And if corporate America didn't want to pay you time and a half, it would need to hire hundreds of thousands of additional workers to pick up the slack-- slashing the unemployment rate and forcing up wages.

President Obama could also expand the ranks of workers eligible for overtime pay by ending the exemption that denies overtime to teachers, doctors, computer professionals, and many others. And he can do all this simply by instructing the Department of Labor to change the rules-- immediately putting money into the pockets of millions of American workers.

...Many of my fellow capitalists will warn you that a higher overtime threshold would be a job killer, but the truth is, we already have more capital than we know what to do with. Corporate profits have doubled over the past 40 years to more than 12 percent of GDP; that’s about a $1 trillion a year in extra profits.

But rather than invest in creating jobs or raising wages, executives like me are mostly spending our windfall profits manipulating the price of our own shares through stock buybacks. In fact, over the past decade, public U.S. corporations have spent an astounding $6.9 trillion buying back shares, reducing the total outstanding, and increasing the value of the remaining shares owned by capitalists like me.

We get richer. You get nothing. Again, sorry. But we're only playing by the rules-- rules that President Obama has the power to change.

President Obama is showing that he isn't shy about using his executive powers to do good things for the American people. But the White House needs a strong public push-- the president needs to hear from as many of you as possible that overtime pay is to the middle class what the minimum wage is to the working poor, and that a stronger middle class is good for business and good for America.

Again, here's the DFA petition.