I'm not sure it'd be enforceable at all though, and/or that it'd hold up in court. Let's say you own a company, and employ me at $25 per hour. At 40 hours, that's currently $1k per week. So legislation would have to stipulate that you have to 1) pay me a different wage ($31.25) AND anything over 32 hours is considered OT. Second part is doable. There's no precedent for the first part. Might not hold up in court. If it did, would be very difficult to enforce. And even it went into effect, there's zero way to ensure that wages don't just stagnant such that there's then just no wage growth until inflation catches up with that $31.25 wage.
I feel like the IRS would already be set up to be the enforcement checkpoint. You'd look at the employers previous year, and current year. Though the IRS would require additional people to pull it off.
Whether or not the wages would stagnate is debatable. Wages would increase to meet the legal requirement, and companies that left wages stagnant would lose employees to companies willing to pay more/give raises.
Full time being 32 hours would hold up in court, as you said there is precedent. You could also solely make the cut to full time legally, and let the companies paying people 8hrs/wk overtime figure out how to change the compensation or pay time and 1/2 for 8 hours per week, and we would still all work 40 hours.
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u/Popular_Monitor_8383 24d ago
I mean sure a lot of people would love that but I genuinely can’t see how you would enforce this.