‘Any opportunity to slow it down’
The now-abandoned rule could have extended overtime protections for an estimated 190,000 workers, many of whom are employed as supervisors in the retail and food service industries. But despite the number of people who stood to benefit from the policy, its repeal provoked little public outcry.
Grguras said she didn’t know about it, and Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Rick Bloomingdale said she’s not alone.
“Those workers, because they’re not organized, I don’t know that they knew they were going to get this [extra pay] even though … the regulation had been done,” he said. “There’s no organization fighting for mid-level supervisors at Wawa and Sheetz, for instance.”
Bloomingdale said he and other labor advocates were left to fill that void. “And actually,” he said, when the state’s Department of Labor and Industry decided to pursue the regulation several years ago, “the governor’s people had reached out to us about pushing for it.”
The two-year-long regulatory process for approving the measure faced fervent opposition from employers across the state.
They argued that a broader overtime guarantee would force them to convert salaried employees into hourly workers — even if employees preferred the flexibility that often comes with a salary. Opponents also said the rule change threatened to put Pennsylvania businesses at a disadvantage compared to employers in states with looser overtime policies. Nonprofits, meanwhile, worried they would not have enough funding to cover extra pay for workers.
Alex Halper, director of government affairs at the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, acknowledged that his organization even preferred a modest minimum wage increase over the repealed overtime regulation.
“The input that we heard from employers all over Pennsylvania indicated that the overtime proposal just had a very, very significant impact on their workplace and how they manage their workforce,” Halper said.
“We certainly appreciate that the legislature brought this overtime issue into the discussion and that it was part of the final budget deal,” he said. And he noted that the Chamber had “been looking at any opportunity to slow [the overtime rule] down.”
‘A direct betrayal’
Bloomingdale, meanwhile, said his union didn’t find out that the overtime expansion was doomed to fail until the eve of the June budget vote.
In a hastily-crafted letter to lawmakers the day of the vote, the AFL-CIO condemned the plan to undo the rule, calling it “a direct betrayal to unions, workers, and activists who fought to restore the forty-hour workweek to some 200,000 salaried workers.”
“We … tried to mobilize and stop it. But the deal had been done, and it was too late,” Bloomingdale said.
“I’m all for the increased funding for education,” he added. But Wolf “left a lot of workers still having to work 50, 60 hours a week, get $15 an hour to run a store … and not get overtime for doing all that extra work.”
In a statement, the governor’s office defended the decision, noting that the $100 million cash infusion the deal secured for disadvantaged schools “is part of the largest school funding increase in state history.”
“This bipartisan agreement is an important first step toward leveling the playing field to make sure students in underfunded districts are not being left behind,” the statement said.
And it added that Wolf would support further action on overtime pay at the federal level. In addition, the statement said, the governor plans to advance other pro-labor regulations through state agencies.