On a street corner in downtown Washington, D.C., David Wise is opening a century-old iron gate in front of an old, boarded-up brick building.
Wise is an investigator for the Government Accountability Office, the government's watchdog group. His mission is to figure out why the government owns so many buildings, like this one, that it doesn't use.
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President Obama's planned move to expand the pool of the nation's employees covered by overtime pay laws was hailed Wednesday by Democrats as key to their midterm election strategy.
And it was just as predictably criticized by conservatives as an overreach by a president who recently characterized income inequality as the "defining challenge of our time."
The president plans to exercise his executive authority on Thursday, leapfrogging Congress to direct the Labor Department to come up with guidelines that would set a new, higher income threshold at which employers are required to pay overtime.
Under current law, only workers earning $455 per week or less are eligible for overtime pay, though two states — California and New York — have independently raised their overtime minimums.
"Working- and middle-class people are not just feeling pressed, but really squeezed," says Mike Lux, a co-founder of Progressive Strategies, a Washington-based political consulting firm. "In that environment, populism tends to rise."
"In terms of the fall campaign, we are building a whole message around helping middle-class folks raise their wages, raise their incomes and make their lives a little better," Lux says. "This executive order, as well as the president's executive order on minimum wages paid by federal contractors, makes a huge difference politically."
Marc Freedman, who heads the labor law policy shop for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, predicted dire consequences blooming from the wage and overtime changes — and linked the problems to the president's health care legislation.
"Changing the rules for overtime eligibility will, just like increasing the minimum wage, make employees more expensive and will force employers to look for ways to cover these increased costs," he said in a statement.
"Similar to minimum wage, these changes in overtime rules will fall most harshly on small and medium-sized businesses already trying to figure out the impact of Obamacare on them," he said.
Obama in early February bypassed Congress and signed an executive order increasing to $10.10 per hour minimum wages government contractors are required to pay as of 2015.
He has also called for an increase in the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 over three years, and for indexing future increases to inflation. His executive moves are seen as part of his State of the Union promise of a "year of action" that would include vigorous use of his presidential authority.
"Wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that's what I'm going to do," he said in that January speech.
A White House official speaking on background Wednesday said the president is making his move on overtime pay at a time when "one of the linchpins of the middle class, the overtime rules that establish the 40-hour work week, have been eroded."
The administration estimates that millions of salaried workers in lower-paying jobs, ranging from office assistants to fast food workers, can be expected to work up to 50 or 60 hours a week without seeing any overtime pay.
A $250 per week threshold for overtime pay eligibility was originally established in 1975 by the Labor Department, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, for "white collar" employees; it was increased by the Bush administration in 2004 to its current $455 level. The White House argues that, adjusted for inflation, that threshold for workers today, overwhelmingly not white collar workers, would be $553.
"This should be the central focus of the fall campaign for Democrats," Lux says, characterizing the president's action on income as appealing to swing voters and the party base.
"These issues play directly to the pocketbooks of white working-class voters," he said, "and really helps us excite the base, turn out the base."
Prominent Republican pollster Whit Ayres, who counts among his clients Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, says "playing around the edges" with wage policy "is not going to address the problem of anemic upward mobility."
"The ticket to upward mobility is expanded middle-class jobs, expanded training for those middle-class jobs," Ayres says, "and making changes in government policy to allow those jobs to be created and to flourish."
At the progressive National Partnership for Women and Families, president Debra Ness hailed Obama's move as a big step for "women and working families."
"Coercive overtime is a huge problem in this country," Ness said in a statement. "When this happens, workers, families, communities and, ultimately, our economy suffer."
A new Bloomberg National Poll suggests that while Americans have decidedly mixed feelings about the president, 69 percent of those polled last week support proposals that would raise the minimum wage.
But there's a caveat, says pollster Ann Selzer, who conducted the survey: the minimum wage is not a wedge issue for voters surveyed, at least "not at this point in the game."
"It's still a theoretical thing," says the Des Moines-based Selzer. "The middle class may start feeling that the Democrats are paying attention to them and doing something if it shows up in their paycheck."
With national minimum wage changes requiring an act of Congress, the administration, as Selzer says, is looking for "arrows in the quiver to bolster the middle class."
The administration looks to be using the executive move on overtime as an arrow designed to potentially create a paycheck effect that will actually move voters when they head to the polls in November.
"This is consistent with the economic populist stance the Democrats are driving in a pretty unfavorable environment for them," says Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic writer and commentator. "They realize they not only have to motivate their base but also mitigate the damage of white, noncollege voters who are going to be their weakness."
"Whether it works or not, we'll see," he says.
The Obama administration's push to put income inequality atop the domestic political agenda has another battlefront.
According to The New York Times, the president "this week will seek to force American businesses to pay more overtime to millions of workers, the latest move by his administration to confront corporations that have had soaring profits even as wages have stagnated."
The Wall Street Journal says that Obama "is expected to order a rule change this week that would require employers to pay overtime to a larger number of salaried workers, two people familiar with the matter said."
The announcement is expected to be made on Thursday. Obama would direct the Labor Department to make the rules changes.
"The directive is meant to help salaried workers, such as fast-food shift supervisors or convenience store managers, who may be expected to work more than 40 hours a week without receiving overtime pay," The Associated Press writes. "For example, the Labor Department could raise the pay threshold for workers covered by overtime rules. Currently, salaried workers who make more than $455 per week are exempt from overtime."
As the Times adds:
"Obama's decision to use his executive authority to change the nation's overtime rules is likely to be seen as a challenge to Republicans in Congress, who have already blocked most of the president's economic agenda and have said they intend to fight his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour from $7.25. ...
"Obama's authority to act comes from his ability as president to revise the rules that carry out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Congress originally passed in 1938. [President George W.] Bush and previous presidents used similar tactics at times to work around opponents in Congress."
Our headline from last night could very well be repeated today:
"Confusion Reigns Over Missing Jet's Final Location"
In fact, to say things are confusing might even be an understatement.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and the 239 people on board disappeared Saturday while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. That much seems to be known for sure.
It's also being reported that authorities say the last message from the plane's cockpit was "all right, roger that," when air traffic controllers in Malaysia handed the flight off to controllers in Vietnam. After that, authorities have said, there was no communication of any type.
But as today's other reports underscore, little else can be said with any certainty:
— Was It Or Wasn't It Off Course? "A senior Malaysian air force official on Tuesday told CNN that after the plane lost all communications around 1:30 a.m. Saturday, it still showed up on radar for more than an hour longer. Before it vanished altogether, the plane apparently turned away from its intended destination and traveled hundreds of miles off course, the official said. It was last detected, according to the official, near Pulau Perak, a very small island in the Straits of Malacca, the body of water between the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian island of Sumatra."
That account matches comments attributed by the Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian to Gen. Tan Sri Rodzali Daud, chief of Malaysia's air force. But — and here's a prime example of the confusion surrounding this story — he later denied saying that radar had tracked the plane to the Straits of Malacca.
According to Reuters, "Indonesia and Thailand, which lie on either side of the northern part of the Malacca Strait, have said their militaries detected no sign of any unusual aircraft in their airspace."
— But, The Search Continues To Widen. Though Rodzali is now denying he said that military radar had tracked the plane to a point about 200 miles west of its intended route, the search for the jet "expanded on Wednesday to cover a swathe of Southeast Asia, from the South China Sea to India's territorial waters, with authorities no closer to explaining what happened to the plane or the 239 people on board," Reuters writes.
So, even though Rodzali says he didn't tell the newspaper that there's radar evidence showing the jet flew over the Straits of Malacca, the search includes that area.
Meanwhile, there's this news from Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "Vietnam sent a crew today to search the Vung Tau area in the nation's southeast after a person said he [had] spotted what appeared to be a plane on fire and sent an e-mail to government officials. Earlier this week, an aircraft had alerted Hong Kong air traffic controllers about sighting metal debris in the sea near Vung Tau, Vietnam's Civil Aviation Authority had said."
This morning's bottom line: We don't know much more than we did last night, and we may not know much more for some time.
As The Guardian says:
"Finding missing aircraft can take days or months; unraveling what went wrong can take years."