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It's Not Just About the Paycheck. Ask Workers. - Bloomberg View

Putting such employees on a time clock is not just a burden. It can seem like an insult. Scott M. Fitzgerald, the director of human resources at Otterbein University, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he’d had staffers at a previous institution cry in his office when told of the change. They saw the shift to hourly pay as a demotion. At the Y, says Baddley, the emotional response has been “intense.” For professionals who’d never before punched a clock, “it was upsetting.”

‘Fight for $15’ targets St. Louis debate | Opinion | stltoday.com

So why would a union spend tens of million dollars on protests while failing to ensure that its own members and staff get $15 an hour? It’s simple — the Fight for $15 campaign is simply a prop to recruit new dues payers, in this case fast-food workers.

Out-of-Office: 24-7 Accessibility May Mean Overtime Liability | Bloomberg BNA

Policies explicitly stating the need for employees to accurately track all of their after-hours working time are essential, as is the obligation to pay employees for any and all overtime work they perform.  And, if employees fail to abide by those time-tracking policies, they should be subject to disciplinary action, Beachboard said.  This may sound counterintuitive to some employers, as most would typically want to reward employees who are willing to put in extra work.  But, in the interest of mitigating risk and enforcing a policy of reporting all compensable time, employers should be prepared to discipline those employees that don’t accurately track and report their time, he said.

Persuasively Bad | U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Of course, it’s meant to be expansive because unions hope it will discourage attorneys from offering labor relations services, which would tilt the playing field to organized labor’s advantage.  Moreover, by limiting employer access to counsel and stifling employer speech, unions also will have more opportunities to catch unsuspecting employers allegedly running afoul of complicated labor regulations.

Outrage after big labor crafts law paying their members less than non-union workers - LA Times

Penny Moore, a bartender and former union shop steward at the Sheraton Universal, said she was perplexed in the weeks after the 2014 law passed when a Sheraton human-resources official told her that many employees would not be getting the promised pay raise. After phoning the union office, she said, she received a call from Unite Here Local 11 organizer Fred Pascual. "He said I've got to look at the bigger picture," Moore said, that "this is going to make all the hotels go union." She said Pascual did not elaborate on his remark, but she interpreted it to mean hotels would embrace collective bargaining agreements in order to pay less.

Michelle Ray: Be wary of minimum wage, Medicare price controls | Dallas Morning News

A company simply can't afford to pay workers more than the value of their work. And so, under Sanders' proposal, any position that generates less than $15 per hour in value for a company would likely be eliminated, leading to more unemployment. One should expect a similar outcome from the proposal for extending overtime pay. To see this link between wage mandates and joblessness, just look at the European Union. According to a 2014 analysis by John Hopkins University economist Steve H. Hanke, the average unemployment rate for the 21 European Union countries with minimum wages was 11.8 percent. For the seven countries without a minimum wage, average unemployment was only 7.9 percent.