“I don’t know how they’re going to cope with it,” Trevor Potter, former Federal Election Commission chairman and general counsel for John McCain’s presidential campaigns told me.
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Political campaigns rely on armies of fresh-out-of-school idealists willing to work long hours for peanuts. One back-of-the-envelope analysis from Hamilton Place Strategies, an economic and public affairs consulting firm, found that junior staffers on Senate campaigns typically clock 69 hours a week, at an average salary of $25,000.
Under the new Labor Department rule, such a worker would receive about $27,000 in overtime, if the work took place over a full year. That means she’d receive more in overtime pay than she would in base salary.
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