Peter Coy | Worker Overtime Pay Is Dying. It Shouldn’t Be. – The New York Times

By Peter Coy

Opinion Writer

“Time and a half for overtime is one of the best-known and most important protections for workers in the United States. Yet many employers routinely undermine the protection by misclassifying workers as managers and thereby making them ineligible for overtime pay.

The extent to which employers game the overtime system was made starkly clear in January in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The title says it all: “Too Many Managers: The Strategic Use of Titles to Avoid Overtime Payments.” “Food cart manager,” “price scanning coordinator,” “carpet shampoo manager,” “lead shower door installer,” “grooming manager” and “director of first impressions” (for a front desk clerk) are some of the “fake-sounding” titles uncovered by the authors, Lauren Cohen of Harvard Business School and Umit Gurun and N. Bugra Ozel of the University of Texas at Dallas School of Management.

I talked to three people who want to make it harder for employers to misclassify workers: Nick Hanauer, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded Civic Ventures, a public policy incubator in Seattle; Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on low- and middle-income workers; and David Weil, who ran the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor during the Obama administration but was rejected by the Senate for the same job in the Biden administration.”