The warnings are coming loud and clear: If employers are required to pay for work done, bad things will happen.

President Obama has issued an executive order, effective this week, that will require that salaried workers be paid the overtime rate if they work more than 40 hours a week, if they earn up to an annual rate of $47,476. Until yesterday, salaried workers could earn as little as $23,660 and not have to be paid any overtime, no matter how many hours above 40 hours a week.

For decades, employers have had a field day with that ploy. They could call a worker a manager, say he or she was salaried, and pay no overtime. This mechanism in the law allowed companies to save themselves billions of dollars over the years and, considering how many years this has been going on, it’s probably hundreds of billions of dollars.

Seeing the injustice of this and knowing that the Congress would not do anything to relieve workers of their burden of unpaid overtime, Obama ordered a new regulation by the U.S. Labor Department that provided overtime pay for millions of workers who have been historically underpaid for the work they did.

Business trade groups immediately jumped in, saying that harm would come to both workers and their employers under the new Labor Department rule. The National Retail Federation’s David French told the New York Times, “This is an extreme revision in the white-collar threshold. By executive fiat, the Department of Labor is effectively demoting millions of workers.”

The business community’s rationale is stunning. When was it ever a demotion to be paid for the work you do, especially if you have been unpaid for all of that work for so many years? It is the same argument that Corporate America has opposed every attempt to raise the minimum wage, anywhere, whether it would be by Congress or state legislatures, or city councils.

You would think that the sky actually was falling and they haul out the same flawed or erroneous “studies” to show that jobs would be lost and businesses would be closed if the minimum wage were raised. The same is true of the overtime for salaried workers. Many studies over many years have shown that raising the minimum wage had little effect on individuals or their jobs or in the number of jobs, in general.

In reality, it is a loophole in the country’s labor laws that allowed employers to work their “managers” for as long as they wish in the course of a week, without having to pay for that work. And, it has been a matter of semantics. The company can call someone a manager, yet not give that person any authority to act as a manager (the power to hire and fire or to effectively recommend, for starters).

It is like calling workers “associates” (Wal-Mart, for one) or “partners.” If it’s all the same to CEOs everywhere, we’ll just call them workers.

The annual cutoff for overtime until this week was $23,660, which comes out to $11.38 an hour. For that low wage, employers were allowed to call the worker a manager and salaried and pay no overtime at time-and-a-half. After yesterday, the cutoff is $47,476 and the hourly rate for that level of annual income is $22.83. If a company is going to say a worker is salaried, at least the rate of pay is more in line with a manager of some kind, whether low or mid-level.

When Vice President Joe Biden went to Ohio this week to highlight the rules and offer a rationale for the change, he was quoted by the Times as saying, “The middle class is getting clobbered. If you work overtime, you should actually get paid for working overtime. For the past 40 years, overtime protections have been increasingly weakened.”

The new rule, opponents argue, could cost billions of dollars and undermine the morale of workers who would have to keep control of the number of hours worked in excess of 40 hours every week. And, the argument goes, they would be demoralized by their having been “demoted” to the category of “hourly worker,” rather than “salaried” worker. It has been our experience that, for an extra $30 or $50 or $100 a week in overtime pay, most workers would be able to suffer with the “demotion” to hourly worker.

Corporate America and all of its constituent trade and other organizations are hoping that Republicans in Congress will stymie this rule, when it comes up for review before their committees, but this is no ordinary year. Republicans are in disarray and some political observers have said we are witnessing the collapse of a political party, with much of the GOP standing in opposition to the candidate who has won most of the primary elections and is considered the nominee of their party.

They hardly have time to continue their war on wage-working men and women or even beat them soundly over an issue such as overtime pay for “salaried” workers. The GOP and its deep-pocketed billionaire and centi-millionaire backers have done that for the last half-century. Their unfettered reign might be coming to an end, as evidenced by the kind of response that young people have had toward a “political revolution” in this year’s presidential primary elections. That “revolution” has had a great effect on the young in the body politic and they are looking at the sorry state of U.S. politics, the economy, and the society, in general.

It surely would be better if the overtime issue had been resolved in the workplaces of America, through effective unions, but, when the chips are down, as they are for workers in the U.S., an improvement in their lives by administrative action will just have to do, until the war on workers by the rich and their minions in government is brought to a halt by the action of millions of those same workers.