The Debate About Overtime

Many a working man still counts on overtime to finance a vacation or a new TV set, but the top ranks of labor increasingly regard the institution as more of a bane than a blessing. Their criticism reflects a growing union feeling that overtime work is stealing a chance to work from the nation's jobless, and their demands to curb it rank with the 35-hour week as a favored solution to high unemployment. In a bow to organized labor, President Johnson joined the attack in his State of the Union message by proposing a study to consider penalties against companies that regularly schedule excessive overtime to avoid hiring extra workers.

The President's penalties could involve legislation ordering companies to pay workers double or even triple time for extra hours worked; but no serious consideration is expected from Congress this year. Nonetheless, U.S. labor unions are dead earnest about curbing overtime on their own. In Detroit, proposals to curtail overtime will be one of the key issues that Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers will take up at the bargaining table this year. The steel industry's labor-management human relations committee is already grappling with the question, and the Rubber Workers, the Cement Masons, the Machinists and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers are among the many other unions strongly opposed to any more than a bare amount of overtime.

Asking for More. Many oldtimers are willing to go along with union opposition to overtime because they do not want or need to put in extra hours at work; average factory wages in December, after all, hit a new record of $102 a week, or $2.50 an hour. But the bulk of younger workers, burdened with the expenses of setting up households, are eager for any additional cash. Says William Goldmann, assistant regional director for the U.A.W. in Los Angeles, "Our members start complaining about excessive overtime, and we get them down to nine or ten hours a day. They work like that for a while, and then they come to us and say they want more overtime."

Any Government attempt to limit overtime would meet fierce opposition from management. Many companies prefer to schedule overtime rather than train someone new, because experienced hands give them better work and save them the expense of added fringe benefits for a new employee. The industries with some of the heaviest overtime are autos, where workers spend 5.4 extra hours a week in the plant, cement (6.6 hr.), grain mill products (7.3 hr.), and paper (5.6 hr.). Thus, even with overtime, few workers work more than a 46-hour week.

The Impetus. Labor Secretary Wirtz insists that hiring new employees instead of working old ones overtime would have increased employment by more than 900,000 last year, but industry hotly disputes this. In the steel industry, most overtime is worked when employees fail to show up for shifts, and no new hiring would be feasible in such cases. The auto industry has dragged in every available trained worker to keep up with the sales race, and Detroit companies have even gone to South Bend to recruit laid-off Studebaker workers. But there is no time to train green hands; automen need production right now.

Opponents of overtime are really asking business to eliminate the peaks and valleys of production--something that management would like to do in any case because it would even out costs. But changing the regular payment for overtime from time and a half to double time would cost industry $46 million extra a week, and, with today's rapidly advancing technology, would not automatically lead to more hirings. "In the long run," warns Inland Steel Vice President William Caples, "anything that becomes expensive we eliminate--we engineer it out." The risk is that such penalties might provide the impetus for new breakthroughs in automation that would make unemployment even worse.

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