> Like all wage and hour protections, overtime is a protection for vulnerable employees against abusive situations. Like all wage and hour protections, overtim

> Like all wage and hour protections, overtime is a protection for vulnerable employees against abusive situations. Like all wage and hour protections, overtime is ostensibly a protection for vulnerable employees against abusive situations. In theory, there's a good outcome in that workers are simply paid more for working lots of hours beyond the cultural norm. In practice, what happens is that companies are incentivized to make peoples' lives difficult with scheduling and limit them to 32 or 36 hours or whatever instead of having them work over 40 hours. This forces anybody who wants to make more money to deal with big scheduling, extra travel costs, and other headaches involved in working multiple jobs. Or they increase wages beyond whatever arbitrary cutoff point exists to qualify for overtime protections and then have carte blanche to pressure them into working lots more hours. These protections actually end up screwing the least well off and poorest people the most. I'm not saying it's all bad, but there are always unintended consequences with economic edicts.