I personally don't understand overtime laws, and happen to know that they hurt more people than they help. For example, a friend of mine works at a job where she recieves an hourly wage plus a commission related to sales. Commissions make up about a third of what she makes total, so its not one of those jobs where comissions are 95% ofyour total salary. Anyway, because law states that you have to be paid time and a half for every hour after 40 that you work each week, the company that she works for simply refuses to allow her to work more than 40 hours even if she wanted to. They figure its cheaper to have an extra employee at the store to make up the hours than it would be to pay time and a half to a few employees that might want to work 50 hours a week. Besides, a 40 hour workweek is pretty low. Most salaried people I know work at least 8 to 6, which is a 50 hour week, and I'm not including time that they may spend extra doing special projects.
All this law does is hurt the low and low middle class. Maybe you want to work 50 or 60 hours one week because you have to pay your bills or you're saving for a house or you want to buy a car, whatever- your employer probably won't let you because they are forced by law to pay you time and a half past 40, so now you have to add the complication of working 2 jobs to pay your bills. Hasn't anyone every though about that? Asked themselves, why do people work 2 jobs, can't they just work more hours on one job? Its almost always because neither job is willing to paying 50% more than what the persons labor is worth.