ERIE, Pa. — As he does during rallies, on Sunday former President Donald Trump talked about a lot of things. He said nobody knows what a Marxist is. He claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris wants to legalize fentanyl. And he said that American cities have been taken over by “migrant gangs and criminal thugs.”
None of those claims is remotely true. But then Trump said something that sounded like it was: That he hated paying overtime and that he didn’t do it.
As Trump tries to attract the blue collar votes he needs to win, it seems counterproductive to disparage an 86-year-old law that for some workers can make the difference between paying the rent and being evicted.
Two of his most prominent allies in Ohio, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, aren’t talking about Trump’s comments. A spokesman for the Democrat Moreno is challenging, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, pointed to what he said was the senator’s long record of protecting and trying to expand overtime.
Trump is notorious for stiffing people who work for him. They include undocumented workers at his golf courses.
In Erie on Sunday, Trump also bragged about not paying overtime, even though it’s required under federal law.
“I know a lot about overtime,” Trump said. “I’d hated they give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hate it.”
Overtime — the requirement that employers pay 150% of workers’ base pay for every hour over 40 worked in a week — was created in 1938 as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act. It applies to all blue collar workers, which the U.S. Department of Labor defines as “workers who perform work involving repetitive operations with their hands, physical skill and energy.”
But over the past 40 years the labor force has shifted dramatically away from jobs that meet that definition, and many of those working in other ways have lost their overtime rights.
Exempted from overtime requirements are jobs that consist mostly of clerical or computer work. The only exception was for those who until July made less than $36,000 a year.
The percentage of salaried workers covered by overtime pay requirements dropped from 60% in 1975 to about 15% now. That means the average such worker is losing almost $18,000 a year that he or she otherwise would have been making, Time Magazine reported in 2022.
During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Vance again made much of his family’s working-class roots. But a spokesman didn’t respond when asked whether the Ohio senator “hated” overtime the way his billionaire running mate did.
Also not responding was Moreno, a Cleveland businessman whose net worth is estimated at between $38 million and $173 million. The GOP Senate candidate and Trump supporter has issues of his own when it comes to paying his employees overtime.
He was sued in 2017 by a Massachusetts employee who claimed that Moreno refused to pay him overtime compensation he had earned. Moreno testified in the case that he shredded monthly overtime records.
Brown, the senator Moreno is challenging, is a longtime supporter of bolstering overtime requirements, his office said.
Last year he introduced the Restoring Overtime Pay Act of 2023, which he said would increase the portion of salaried workers eligible for overtime from 15% to 55%. And this year the Labor Department adopted Brown’s plan to increase the salary threshold below which overtime would be required from $36,000 to $44,000 in July, $59,000 on Jan. 1, and update every three years after 2027.
However, unlike a law passed by Congress, Labor Department rules can be undone by a new administration.
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