President Barack Obama will reportedly unveil an overtime rule this week that could give raises to 5 million Americans.
According
to Politico, Obama's proposal will raise the overtime pay ceiling from $23,600 to $50,440, meaning nearly all workers paid that much in salary will receive overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours in a week.
Politico claims the White House will begin discussing the plan on Tuesday and Obama is scheduled to address it during a speech in Wisconsin on Thursday.
The new ceiling will cover the 40th percentile of income, reports Politico.
The overtime plan has been in the works since last year, and many conservatives are against it because they say it will hurt the U.S. job market by limiting what employers can do.
"The president's policies are making it difficult for employers to expand employment," House Speaker
John Boehner said last year. "And until the president's policies get out of the way, employers are going to continue to sit on their hands."
Overtime pay is time-and-a-half, and Obama has long been expected
to take executive action to more than double the high-water mark.
"This is absolutely one of the best practical ways to give people the on-ramp to the middle class," Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio said in April. "When you strip people of their overtime pay, which is what's happened over the years, they really don't have a chance to get ahead: They're working harder and harder and not seeing real pay increases."
Brown is one of 26 Democrats in the Senate who have been pushing for the president to raise the overtime ceiling to $56,680.
In a May blog post, Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez wrote the Obama administration's overtime proposal has been submitted to the Office of Management and Budget for review.
Perez then said more needs to be done to improve the lives of American workers.
"But updating the overtime rules isn't the only fix that's needed,"Perez wrote. "As President Obama has said, it's time to raise the national minimum wage, whose value has been eroding for more than four decades."
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