 Since 1938, we've had laws to protect workers from being forced to work overtime without getting paid for it. It's a simple principle, pay people for the work they do. The problem we have now is that the people these laws were designed to protect are no longer being protected. There are millions of Americans who regularly work overtime and don't get paid a cent for it. Hourly workers in most service and blue collar jobs are guaranteed the right to overtime pay. If they work more than 40 hours in a week, their employer is required by law to pay them time and a half for the extra hours. For salaried workers, it's a bit different. Whether they're eligible for overtime pay is determined by their salary and the nature of their work. Federal overtime rules don't apply to workers who, because of their pay and responsibilities, have enough power and authority within their workplace that they don't need these protections. We're talking about professional and managerial workers who do relatively high level work, have a high degree of control over how they spend their time, have a department and employees to supervise, and here's the critical part, who earn a salary that actually reflects this. Federal rules governing overtime pay set a salary threshold. Any salaried worker earning below this threshold is guaranteed the right to earn overtime pay. That means that no matter what your boss calls you, store manager, shift supervisor, assistant to the regional manager, if your salary is below the threshold, you have to be paid for your extra hours. This is a simple and important protection. But here's the problem, the salary threshold has never been pegged to inflation. The salary threshold today is only $23,660 a year. That's worth less than half what it was 40 years ago. In 1975 it covered about 61% of all salaried workers. Today it protects only 8%. Here's what that means in practice. Let's take Jane. She works at a car wash and makes $30,000 a year. She spends most of her time drying cars, but because she helps schedule her coworker shifts and occasionally manages inventory, her boss gave her a job title of shift supervisor. Most weeks she ends up working close to 60 hours, but because her employer calls her a manager and because her salary of $30,000 is above the current threshold, she gets paid nothing for those extra 20 hours of work. Her boss has an incentive to say she's a manager because it means he can make her work extra hours without having to pay her. But this problem has a very straightforward solution. Raise the overtime salary threshold and index it to inflation. The threshold is meant to protect workers like Jane from being taken advantage of by their employers, but it's just too low to actually work. If we want overtime protection to work like it's supposed to, the Labor Department has to update the law.