Employees will see less flexibility and lower pay; employers bracing for higher costs and an administrative nightmare.
How the Overtime Rule Will Impact Tennessee Small Business Owners
If the Department of Labor’s
updated overtime rule goes into effect on Dec. 1, NFIB estimates that 44
percent of small businesses across the country will be harmed. The rule doubles
the overtime threshold, making all salaried workers earning less than $47,476
eligible for overtime pay. In order to comply, small business owners will have
to raise salaries, pay overtime, or reclassify salaried workers as hourly and
closely track their time (or prohibit/limit overtime work). One of the small
business owners affected is Joshua Boyd, CEO and owner of Nashville
ComputerPROS.
Boyd’s company helps customers
decide on the right computer for their home or business, offers computer
service for all major brands, serves as an Apple Authorized Service Provider,
and provides an array of IT business consulting services.
How will the federal overtime
rule impact your business?
The rule will cause a lot of administrative problems for our business.
Due to the service business that we’re in, sometimes employees stay over and
work late, and then some days they will leave early or take a personal day to
get some errands ran. I’ve always been very flexible with this because
everyone here works hard and we all appreciate each other. Since we pay
twice monthly, it will become very difficult to manage this flexibility, due to
overtime rules. We will have to go to a rigid structure to avoid
unforeseen overtime charges when we go to run payroll. Our current
structure allows a lot of freedom and we, like most small businesses, don’t
abuse our employees. Our employees will definitely earn less money than what
they are currently earning, and it will create an administrative nightmare for
our company.
What will you have to do to
prepare for the rule’s implementation on Dec. 1?
We are trying to get educated as quickly as possible on what we are
going to have to do to become compliant. Thankfully, the NFIB has a lot of
information on the matter. One thing that we’re in the process of
implementing is a time-clock system for our employees. This is going to
cost us over a thousand dollars per year just for this one feature. We
don’t really know of an alternative, shy of having employees track their own
time, which is a waste of time for them and a drain on their productivity.
For more information on the
impact of the rule, what to do to comply, and how NFIB is fighting back, visit www.NFIB.com/overtime.
