Nicole Woo, senior policy analyst at the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice, notes that federal overtime rules were originally established to protect employees from being asked to work long hours without pay. Yet by classifying workers with managerial, administrative or professional duties as salaried employees, businesses could avoid the overtime requirement—even if the employees spent only a few hours a week on managerial tasks, with the rest of their time spent on stocking shelves or working a cash register.

The salary threshold hasn’t been updated in more than a decade, she notes. “People were being left behind, and many people were working a lot of overtime and were not being compensated,” Woo says. “If you think about the idea that people could be earning less than $30,000 a year, working crazy hours, and not getting a dollar of overtime, it just needed to be changed.”