Research

January 31, 2023

Walk into a restaurant, retail store or hotel, and you might encounter a manager who seems to be doing the same tasks as the people he’s managing. Maybe you’re in one of those jobs.

A lawsuit by employees against a retail store revealed how meaningless the title of manager can be: the store managers were “stocking shelves, running cash registers, unloading trucks and cleaning parking lots, floors and bathrooms.” Hardly the types of responsibilities that go with overseeing one’s coworkers.

The employees were suing for overtime pay under a Depression-era federal law to receive back pay for overtime when they worked more than 40 hours per week.

Employers are exempt from paying overtime under this rule, however, if the employee is a manager earning more than $35,568 per year, rather than an hourly wage. One last requirement to qualify for the overtime exemption is that employers must give the worker executive or administrative duties that include supervising others on the job.

To satisfy the amorphous definition of who qualifies as a manager, new research finds that U.S. employers are much more likely to come up with creative, “fake-sounding” managerial titles – bingo manager, food-cart manager, director of first impressions, carpet-shampoo manager, and lead shower-door installer – for jobs paying just above the overtime pay threshold.

Employers “strategically use job titles to exploit regulatory [pay] thresholds,” which saves more than 13 percent for each manager who qualifies as exempt from the overtime rule, said the researchers, who include a Harvard Business School professor. The practice is “systematic” and saves U.S. employers some $4 billion in payroll costs every year.

The situation for workers used to be worse, however. Millions more became eligible for overtime pay when the pay threshold was increased 50 percent, to $684 per week – or $35,568 per year – in January 2020, from the $455 per week rate in place at the time of this study. …Learn More

Research

September 13, 2022

People with disabilities have high rates of food insecurity because they earn less or can’t work at all. Add to that their unusually large expenses for health care and assistive equipment like wheelchairs and special computers.

But the roots of food insecurity run deeper than just the financial constraints. Even middle-income people with disabilities are more food insecure, which the USDA defines as either deficiencies in nutrition or not having enough to eat.

Part of the problem is where they tend to live, according to a new Urban Institute study. Counties with unusually large disability populations have fewer places to shop for groceries and an oversupply of fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and small grocery stores with limited shelf space. Snack foods and sweet beverages are abundant in these establishments but the selection of fruits, vegetables and lean meats is limited.

A shortage of stores that sell healthy food is a bigger problem in the cities with the highest disability rates than in similar rural areas, the researchers found. But food deserts – a shortage of options for grocery shopping – are more concentrated in the less populated Southeast and Appalachia, as well as rural pockets in Maine, Michigan and New Mexico. The researchers used two sources of disability data: general disability rates in the U.S. Census, as well as data on people with disabilities severe enough to qualify them for Social Security benefits.

Two rural municipalities dramatically illustrate the difference in access to food establishments between areas with high and low disability rates. One in four residents reported having a disability in Hickman, a city tucked into the southwestern corner of Kentucky. But Hickman has fewer than three establishments that sell food for each 1,000 residents.

At the other extreme, Billings, Montana’s disability rate is half that of Hickman’s and there are 13 food establishments per 1,000 residents. …Learn More