WASHINGTON – Central to our national self-understanding is the idea that hard work pays off. Americans have always tolerated rather high levels of inequality, as long as most people had a chance to rise.
Thus was Chris Christie’s opening tribute to his hard-working parents and grandparents, the most affecting part of his announcement on Tuesday that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. The New Jersey governor bestowed praise across gender lines, describing his grandmothers as women “who knew how to work and who knew that hard work would deliver something for their children.”
This section of Christie’s speech got little attention, probably because it was seen as political boilerplate, the kind of thing politicians like to say to connect themselves to the struggles of their fellow citizens. But work, its rewards and its discontents will be central to our nation’s debate going into the 2016 campaign. And President Obama has laid down a marker for testing how seriously politicians take the obligation to make hard work pay.
To much bellyaching from Republicans and business groups, Obama is putting forward new rules that would make up to 5 million more American workers eligible for overtime pay. He’s doing this by ending a scam through which employers designate even relatively low-paid workers as managers to get around the law, which requires an overtime premium after 40 hours per week.
Under the current rules, as Obama wrote earlier this week in The Huffington Post, workers earning as little as $23,660 a year can be robbed of overtime by being given supervisory or managerial designations. The new regulation would raise the threshold to a more plausible $50,440 a year.