Washington’s Department of Labor & Industries unveiled a set of proposed changes to the state’s overtime rules last month, proposing a substantial overhaul that has the potential to affect hundreds of thousands of paychecks statewide, including workers in Clark County.

The changes aim to provide what L&I characterizes as a long-overdue update to the state’s salary threshold for overtime-exempt workers, which hasn’t been updated since the 1970s.

“So many things have changed in those 40 years,” says L&I spokesman Tim Church.

But the scale of the proposal — which could more than triple the minimum allowed salary for some categories of white-collar workers — has caught the business community by surprise and led to complaints that L&I is jumping too far, too fast. The new rules may be finalized later this year.

Stagnant minimums

Compensation for full-time employees is generally structured in one of two ways: an employee is either hourly, meaning they are paid a fixed amount of money per hour of work, or they are salaried, meaning they are paid a fixed amount of money per pay period regardless of the number of hours worked.