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Washington's overtime law included a three-year phase-in, meant to ease the process. Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 55 hours a week. This year, the thr

Washington's overtime law included a three-year phase-in, meant to ease the process. Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 55 hours a week. This year, the threshold is 48 hours, and next year it drops to 40. Schreiber says already, he cannot afford to pay overtime. Instead, he's brought in additional workers to spread the hours around. It's allowed him to keep nearly all his workers to 48 hours a week, not more. This reminds me of how some businesses will cap work hours so that their workers don't qualify as "full-time employees". In my spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum fantasy land, I would attempt to mitigate this by making all such laws use continuous functions instead of thresholds. This would also resolve a lot of the confusion around income tax brackets.

VancouverMan 3y ago
An even easier solution is to get rid of these artificial and rather arbitrary distinctions and thresholds that have been imposed by government over the years. As we can see here, all they do is introduce economic distortions that in turn cause various problems for both the employees and the employers. Instead of doing productive work, the employees and employers waste far too many resources working around or trying to cope with these unnecessary bureaucratic impediments. Even if such regulations may have been introduced under the guise of helping workers, they've instead created a situation where workers are worse off in new ways.