Why David Weil Is the Most Important Biden Nominee You've Never Heard Of

[Nevilledog]

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Timothy Noah
@TimothyNoah1
The federal government basically stopped enforcing the overtime part of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1975. Under Obama, wages and hour chief David Weil tried to remedy that. Now the business lobby is trying to bar him from doing that again.

newrepublic.com
Why David Weil Is the Most Important Biden Nominee You’ve Never Heard Of
It’s about overtime pay, a crucial leg of the New Deal that’s vital to a robust middle class. And the business lobby—and maybe a certain West Virginia senator—are in the way.
3:07 PM · Feb 2, 2022

https://newrepublic.com/article/165258/david-weil-biden-nominee-overtime-pay-labor-department

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https://archive.fo/HjYOQ

The business lobby is in a fury about President Joe Biden’s renomination of a soft-spoken economist named David Weil, who propounds the unacceptably radical notion that the nation’s wage and hours laws ought to be enforced. “Wages before inflation are rising for workers of all skill levels amid an historic labor shortage,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized last week (“David Weil vs. Small Business”). Businesses “don’t need a regulator whose main goal is to use coercion to raise costs for employers trying to emerge whole from the pandemic.”

Weil was administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under President Barack Obama, and the Journal and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Heritage Foundation (which by law, incidentally, is not supposed to lobby) all seek to punish Weil for promulgating policies that Biden’s Labor Department will likely reimpose in some form, whether the Senate confirms Weil or not. (As usual, a key obstacle to confirmation is Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia.) These policies don’t put new burdens on business. They seek to restore old burdens from which business long ago wriggled free. Perhaps the best example is the Labor Department’s long twilight struggle to get business to take seriously its legal requirement under the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) that people who work more than 40 hours within a given week be paid time and a half. Its latest attempt will be a proposed regulation that’s expected to be introduced this April.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, is a good example of New Deal legislation that wouldn’t have a prayer of passing Congress today—not because of any weakness in the statute (drafted by Senator Hugo Black, Democrat of Alabama, shortly before he was elevated to the Supreme Court), but because today’s Democratic members of Congress are way too easily intimidated from passing such sweeping reforms. Even in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt had to appease Southern Democrats to get the bill passed by exempting farm laborers. Still, the bill did eventually pass.

The Wall Street Journal would have you believe that a temporary labor shortage in the midst of an extremely robust economic recovery is reason enough not to enforce statutory limits on working hours. Give me a break. The seventy-fifth United States Congress (1937–39) imposed those limits during an especially rough patch of the Great Depression, when unemployment rose to 20 percent.

*snip*

[SharonClark]

1. Thanks for posting.

[MyOwnPeace]

2. One would think......

that this guy would be a HERO with the blue collar gang.
But alas, I'm afraid their eyes have been glazed over with a spray of orange......

[Wounded Bear]

3. K & R...nt

[niyad]

4. KNR and bookmarking for a bit later.

[Hekate]

5. KnR