Only Americans who make less than $23,660 a year are automatically eligible for time-and-a-half pay after working 40 hours a week. Today, that’s only 11 percent of salaried workers. It didn’t used to be this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way, argues venture capitalist Nick Hanauer.
Hanauer believes the president can and should take executive action to raise the salary threshold for overtime eligibility.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/middle-class-cant-get-ahead
In it he argues "To get the country back to the same equitable standards we had in 1975, the Department of Labor would simply have to raise the overtime threshold to $69,000." and "were the Labor Department instead to narrow these exemptions, millions more Americans would receive the overtime pay they deserve."