WASHINGTON – Paula Hart and Dave Toeniskoetter sat outside the Cannon House Office Building last week after a day of back-to-back meetings with Minnesota's congressional delegation had ended.
Their pitch to extend the time their human services businesses have to comply with new federal overtime pay rules had been made.
Hart, the CEO of Volunteers of America Minnesota, and Toeniskoetter, CEO of the Mendota Heights-based independent living business Dungarvin, are trying to balance fair pay for workers with the cost of serving their intellectually and developmentally disabled clients.
The pair, plus others in the state's human services sector, want Minnesota's federal politicians to press the U.S. Labor Department to extend the time they get to apply rules that will more than double the base salary of workers who can be declared exempt from overtime.
They say they need the time to raise more government funding for Medicaid, which pays for virtually all of the services they provide.
"We're eternal optimists, or we wouldn't do this work," Hart said.
At issue are federal rules expected out in May. As proposed, those rules say employees must make more than $50,440 a year to be exempted from overtime. Under current law, they need only make more than $23,660 to be denied overtime.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the new salary limit. So do some small business groups.