Casar Wins Texas Seat With a Bill for Double-Time Overtime

Card photograph: ARCHIVE, April 25, 2024. Greg Casar at a protest at the University of Texas at Austin. ScreamOfTheNight / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped for the card; adaptation shared under the same license. Source photograph.

Greg Casar won Texas’s 37th District, according to an AP call carried by Fox News. His return keeps a specific wage demand in Congress: double-time pay for covered overtime hours.

Decision Desk HQ independently called the race against Republican Lauren Peña. Its early-Wednesday count showed Casar with about 84 percent, with more than 95 percent reported. Those were preliminary returns, not a certified final margin.

Casar introduced the Double the Wage for Overtime Act, H.R. 9216, on June 9. It would replace the Fair Labor Standards Act’s time-and-a-half premium with twice the regular rate, beginning 180 days after enactment. It remains a bill.

The proposal complements Analilia Mejia’s support for a higher federal minimum wage. One raises the lowest permitted wage; the other raises what an employer owes for taking more of a worker’s week.

ARCHIVE, January 2, 2023. Greg Casar’s official congressional portrait. Ike Hayman / U.S. House of Representatives. Public domain. Source photograph.

An extra $50 for five covered hours

The existing federal statute generally requires time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a workweek for covered, nonexempt employees. Casar’s bill would change the rate rather than reduce that basic weekly threshold. A 40-hour week would not automatically become a shorter week under this legislation.

For a worker earning a regular $20 an hour, a 45-hour week with five covered overtime hours currently produces $950 in gross pay. The proposed rate would produce $1,000: an increase of $50, or about 5.3 percent, for the week.

Those calculations assume the hours are covered and the regular rate remains the same. The proposal changes the premium; it does not turn every salaried position or every additional hour into federally protected overtime.

The bill’s operative text is short. It replaces the time-and-a-half language throughout section 7 of the Fair Labor Standards Act and in several related provisions of section 13. It does not create a government reimbursement program for employers. The higher amount would be part of wages owed for covered work, not a tax refund workers must wait to claim.

Casar introduced the measure with 18 original cosponsors, including Pramila Jayapal, Steven Horsford and Chris Deluzio as well as Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Delia Ramirez. It was referred to the House Education and Workforce Committee. The 180-day transition would begin after enactment, not from the June introduction date or election day.

The cost falls on the employer

The proposal would make a long workweek more expensive for the employer that schedules it. A business could hire more staff or reduce overtime; where the additional hours remain, covered workers would receive the higher rate as wages, rather than depend on a discretionary bonus.