Hi everybody.
Last summer, I got a letter from a woman named Elizabeth Paredes from Tucson, Arizona.
Elizabeth is the mom of a 3-year-old boy, and an assistant manager at a sandwich shop. She earns about 2,000 a month, and she routinely works some 50 hours a week, sometimes even more. But because of outdated1 overtime2 regulations, she doesn't have to be paid a dime3 of overtime. She wrote: It's not easy work and requires a lot of time away from my son… at times I find it's not worth it.
Things like the 40-hour workweek and overtime are two of the most basic pillars of a middle class life. But for all the changes we've seen in our economy, our overtime rules have only been updated once since the 1970s. Just once. In fact, forty years ago, more than 60 percent of workers were eligible4 for overtime based on their salaries.
But t
