090616 Re: DOL regulation to mandate overtime pay for certain classes of employees working > 40 hr/wk

If income is an indicator of where the pathway up lies, one of the inhibitors for those climbing up from the bottom is how those first tiers of low-level management and supervisory positions, though you're just beginning to earn more significant compensation, are also accompanied by serious increases in hours "on the job" and other effects upon an employee's quality-of-life. Some employers rely very heavily on value-added work from such employees, because they know their personal motives and ambitions will make them pay the price in terms of their personal - uncompensated - time. This means that a significant amount of worker-added value can be "stolen": families suffer the de facto loss of a family member with no consequent increase in benefits to the families such as improved child-care, or real family vacations, or better, more expensive food, and the worker creating that value can be worked until these stresses cause burn out and s/he is disposed of or tracked into some dead-end. On the institutional side, this can mean that those levels just above the low-level, high responsibility/burn-out positions, employees earning something more than the median income, are usually filled from outside because filling them from below causes a loss of the value added by cheaper employees. Many of us have probably seen how these mid-level positions can be filled with people having more connections than fit in their professional credentials or educational degrees, let alone aptitudes. Because they are coming into an organization above the first-tier burn-out inducing level, if mid-level does add value, the price-tag is higher than that created at lower levels. All of which adds up to some degree of programmed churn and inefficiency and loss of economic value, not to mention what could be characterized as a taking, hours of life taken without compensation, from workers, and their families, who lack the means and opportunities to set the price for what their own labor is worth. Is it just for us as a state or society to stand by and knowingly benefit from this taking?