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Berdie Gillis, a former Dollar General store manager. “There are not
enough hours, and not enough people. The turnover was horrible.”
Dollar-store managers don’t
benefit much from the Fair Labor
Standards Act. Enacted in 1938,
the bedrock labor law established
the country’s minimum wage and
overtime protections, and to this
day serves as the primary governor on the 40-hour work week.
HUFFINGTON
10.06.13
sor, is that the law is still predicated on the industrial economy
of the mid-20th century, when
the lines between managers and
rank-and-file workers were clear.
The modern service economy, she
said, is full of workers who may
have “manager” in their title, but
largely function as manual laborers and clerks.
The system “actually forces
the management to squeeze peo-
“They really worked people into
the ground until they got everything
they could get out of you.”
By requiring that companies
pay workers time-and-a-half for
overtime, the law makes bosses
pay a price for making their employees work long hours. It also
encourages companies to spread
the work to different employees to avoid paying a premium.
Because they’re part of management and work on salary, whitecollar supervisors are exempt
from the overtime law.
The problem, according to Jennifer Klein, a Yale history profes-
ple, to squeeze them and make
them work hours off the clock,
and for managers to pick up the
slack,” said Klein.
“The model was based on fulltime employment in an industrial
enterprise, where there was a
clear recognition of who was the
boss and who was the employee,”
Klein continued. “Employers obviously have a lot of incentive to
exploit the ambiguities and continue to manipulate the meaning
of ‘employee.’”
The number of lawsuits alleging misclassification and wage
violations in all industries has