Today's News & Commentary — December 26, 2016

USA Today has a survey of what will happen to worker pay and benefits in 2017. The short version: States may continue to raise minimum wages, and there’s a small chance the federal minimum wage will rise to $10 an hour. Regarding overtime pay, a federal judge’s potential overturning of the Obama Administration’s mandate may have a dampened effect: “Many businesses already have increased managers’ salaries to the $47,476 threshold to avoid paying overtime or converted salaried staffers to hourly employees so their hours can be tracked for overtime.” The article goes on to predict the future of the joint employer rule, paid family and sick leave, and subsidized child care.

CNBC explores this “staying power” of the overtime rule in some more detail. Despite the lawsuit, the article notes, the rule’s effects were already underway. Compensation information and research company PayScale analyzed over 500 jobs that offered salaries between the new and old thresholds and “found that the number making in between those two numbers dropped sharply over the past two quarters.” Furthermore, 40 percent of the corporate clients of Salary.com, a compensation and software analytics firm, had made raises over the threshold or had reclassified workers.

For those of you into “very wonkish” economics, Paul Krugman at the New York Times has an analysis of trade deficits’ effects on manufacturing jobs. For those of us who are not, his bottom line: “yes, trade deficits reduce manufacturing production and jobs. They played a significant although far from dominant role in manufacturing job losses after 2000.”