Paul Sassone

Some of us have investments, stocks, bonds, 401Ks. Some of us even know what a hedge fund is.

But for the rest of us, the world of economics is divided into two parts, wages and prices.

Wages is money that comes in.

Prices is money that goes out.

You don’t hear much about prices in the news. But the news is crammed full of stuff about wages. And wages themselves are divided into two parts:

1. We need more wages.
2. We can’t afford to pay more wages.

Those are the two sides, locked in an ongoing struggle over the twin issues of minimum wage and living wage.

The latest chapter in this struggle is over overtime pay.

Thanks once again to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, since 1938 the Fair Standards Labor Act requires employers to pay overtime — time-and-a-half — to employees working more than 40 hours a week.

But salaried workers are not eligible for overtime pay once their salary reaches $455 a week, $23,660 a year.

This threshold has been in effect since the 1970s. Today, only 8 percent of all full-time salaried employees make salaries below this.

Exempt from the overtime rules are executives, administrative and professional employees. So, over the years guess what has happened? Employers have decreed some workers to be managers and thus exempt from overtime pay. So, so-called managers work endless hours for no overtime pay, often making less money than the nonmanagers they supervise.

Once, I was one of those managers. I “supervised” people. But I couldn’t hire, couldn’t fire, couldn’t award raises or bonuses. But I could work a lot of hours.

To remedy the overtime situation, the U.S. Labor Department wants to raise the threshold so that salaried workers are eligible for overtime until their salary reaches $970 a week, $50,440 a year.

Employers don’t want this to happen. It would cost them money. Which brings me back to the second half of the economic world — prices.

These same business people who don’t want to pay more overtime are the people who raise prices on goods and services.

They don’t consult with you or me about raising prices. They just do it. Because if they asked you and me if we wanted to pay more for milk, or bread, or cars, or medicine, we would say exactly what they say about paying overtime: No, we don’t want to pay more.

The difference, unfortunately, is that we have no choice in the matter — unless, as in the overtime recommendation from the Labor Department, the government goes to bat for us.