More regulation vandalism

Many businesses operate under very thin profit margins.  So  this typically dumb Leftist attempt to force them to pay their workers more must have bad consequences.  It's most likely effect is to increase unemployment as businesses can no longer make ends meet and thus have to close

Story by the Associated Press; curated by Jon Street.

The government’s new rules requiring overtime pay for millions of workers have small business owners facing some hard choices.

The regulations being issued by the Labor Department Wednesday would double to $913 a week from $455 the threshold under which salaried workers must be paid overtime. In terms of annual pay, the threshold rises to $47,476 from $23,660. The rules take effect Dec. 1.

Many businesses like restaurants, retailers, landscapers and moving companies will have to transition staffers, many of whom are low-level managers, to hourly pay and limit the number of hours these employees work. That can increase the workload for other staffers, have everyone scrambling to get work done in fewer hours and hurt morale. Some owners say they’ll have to limit hiring, cut services or other costs. Others are turning to technology to try to get work done in less time. And some say they’ll give staffers a raise to get them out of overtime territory.....To Read More.....

My Take - This issue of overtime pay for salaried employees, and in truth, that resonated with me.  Let's be fair - do we really think all companies are really being "fair" to their salaried employees? I don't! Why? Because employers are people, and people will always be people, and there's no "Book of Fair". What's fair? Who decides? Actually everyone decides! Because everyone has their own definition of what's fair - and in so many cases I've found what's deemed to be fair depends on whose ox is being gored. Fair can't be codified without being "unfair" to someone. Fair has no universal definition unless it's so broad it has no meaning.  Fair has no modalities or parameters.  That means fair has no real logical foundation.   Fair often times ends up being nothing more than an emotion reaction!  I know...I know.... that's not fair!

However, I don't like the government deciding that issue.  The government is even less qualified to decide whether anything is fair or not than the rest of us.   I don't like minimum wage laws. I don't like people who've never had a job, never started a business, never had to write payroll checks, never borrowed money to keep the business afloat, never had their house on the line, and never went without a payday in order to pay their employees telling me or anyone else "what's fair". The market place fixes that - and admittedly - at times in unpleasant ways, but market place fixes don't require another expensive and incompetent layer of bureaucracy leaching capital from the system.   That's what's not fair!