Overtime Law Repeal Hits Some Doubly

Delivery driver Gerald Hackler often works long, hard days carting explosives to dusty construction sites and rock quarries, sometimes staying on the job up to 16 hours.

Still, the payoff has been sweet. Along with bringing home plenty of regular time-and-a-half overtime pay, Hackler has gotten a double-time premium for the days when he puts in more than 12 hours.

But no more. A relatively unheralded provision in the Jan. 1 repeal of California’s daily overtime rules lifted the obligation on many employers to pay thousands of workers double their normal rate when they put in more than 12 hours in a single day. It also scrapped double time that was required, in certain circumstances, for hourly employees who came in all seven days in a given workweek.

The result--that some workers are putting in the same long hours they did last year but receiving less money--”is a recipe for a lot of poor morale,” said Steve Mardon, editor of ShiftWork Alert, a monthly newsletter focusing on work-related fatigue and safety issues.

Those affected include drivers, manufacturing workers, technicians, restaurant employees and others accustomed to earning double-time pay in exchange for prolonged hours on the job. By one rough estimate, the double-time change could, in any given week, affect 1% of working Californians, or about 150,000 people.

As more employers learn about the regulatory reform allowing elimination of double-time pay, frictions are developing in workplaces scattered around the state.

One manager who asked not to be identified, the head of human resources at a San Diego-area aerospace firm that has eliminated double-time pay in most cases, acknowledged that employees “feel like they’re losing out on some extra bucks that they earn on hard, long shifts.”

Still, he said, the company won’t restore the double-time premium to the workers who lost it. It’s important for the company to “lower costs a bit,” he said.

When the since-disbanded California Industrial Welfare Commission voted last year to kill the daily overtime rules governing many of the state’s big industries, the issue of double-time pay was largely overlooked.

Most of the focus was on scuttling the long-standing mandate for employers to pay hourly workers, including part-timers, time-and-one-half overtime wages whenever they put in more than eight hours in a day.

Although organized labor and part-time employees opposed the move, many employer groups and ordinary Californians say the change is giving more full-time workers a chance to have flexible schedules. At the same time, while everyone agrees that some part-timers who put in long days are losing money, supporters of the daily overtime repeal say that it is costing full-time workers little, if anything, in wages.

That’s because the 8 million hourly workers at job sites subject to the repeal still qualify for regular overtime pay as long as they put in more than 40 hours in a given week, as provided by federal law.

But that’s scant consolation for Hackler and other workers like him. Hackler, who lives in an unincorporated area of Butte County in Northern California, said he earned about $40,000 last year. With the elimination of double time, he expects to lose $3,000 to $4,000 a year.

The repeal of the daily overtime and double time, Hackler said, is intended to benefit 40-hour-a-week office workers who want to, for example, leave a couple of hours early one day and make up the time on another day. Those workers, he said, “don’t seem to have the strains and responsibilities that we have. . . . We don’t even know what it’s like to work just 40 hours a week.”

“There’s nothing I do or my co-workers do that doesn’t revolve around work,” said Hackler, 37, who has a 17-year-old son. “We have to work the hours we work just to make ends meet. If work comes up, you have to take it.”

What’s more, Hackler said, because employers around the state are taking advantage of the overtime and double-time pay repeal to cut wages, he doesn’t regard changing jobs as a realistic option. That is especially so, he said, because he lives in a rural area with limited job possibilities. His wife, Mary, works at the same company as a part-time driver.

Also feeling the pinch of lost double time is Mary Piowaty, a part-time respiratory therapist at Lassen Community Hospital in Susanville, about 90 miles northwest of Reno.

Piowaty, 44, is normally scheduled for two 12-hour days every week. She never earned straight overtime for her scheduled hours because of a waiver received by the hospital under an agreement reached with employees to promote flexible schedules.

Yet Piowaty used to earn ample double time because the hospital frequently called her back to work beyond her scheduled hours, time that wasn’t covered by the waiver. One day in December, for example, she put in 20 hours, which meant she received eight hours of double-time pay.

But now, taking advantage of the state’s daily overtime repeal, the hospital is no longer paying double time.

Piowaty said the gross pay on her first check after double time was eliminated, covering a two-week period, was $66 less than it would have been last year. “I see it as losing my grocery money,” she said. “I have four children at home.”

But like other employers who in the past paid double time, David Anderson, the administrator of Lassen Community Hospital, said it sometimes is too much of a cost to bear in a competitive business world. Anderson said his facility faces increasing cost-containment pressures, particularly from the federal government.

“We need to minimize salary and benefit costs to the extent we’re able to within the law,” he said, while adding that Lassen has budgeted 3% raises for 1998. Anderson said the hospital’s financial condition “is good, and we want to maintain that.”

Various studies, while not yet conclusive, suggest that workers who put in lots of overtime face enormous strains.

One study has found higher suicide rates among people who frequently work overtime. Separate research detected lower birth weights among babies whose mothers often put in overtime.

In addition, a review of construction managers who worked overtime found that they had higher levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, factors linked to cardiovascular disease.

In the entertainment industry, unions launched a push last year for a 14-hour limit on the workday. It began after an assistant camera operator, Brent Hershman of West Hills, died in a car crash while driving home after 19 hours on the job.

Most employers, in fact, don’t put workers on long shifts or extensive overtime because they consider it counterproductive.

“It just doesn’t make sense to work people beyond 12 hours. It becomes a safety issue,” said Anita Gorino, a human resources consultant in Thousand Oaks. She added, “People get tired, and they’re just not as productive.”

On the other hand, for many of the workers who have shouldered the burden of long hours, double-time pay has provided some relief, but that’s now changing.

Surveys by two California business organizations--the Professionals in Human Resources Assn. and the Employers Group--show that the vast majority of the state’s employers plan to take advantage of the repeal.

Squabbling over the end of double time could get more heated in California as union contracts come up for renegotiation in the state.

Tom Rankin, president of the California Labor Federation, predicted that more and more employers will say that “our nonunion competition no longer has to pay daily overtime and double time, and we don’t want to either.”

In the past, when unions agreed to waive double-time requirements, Rankin said, they normally extracted some other protection against excessive overtime. The old rules, he said, “provided a floor for bargaining, but now the floor is gone.”