Washington's overtime law included a three-year phase-in, meant to ease the process. Last year, overtime pay kicked in after 55 hours a week. This year, the threshold is 48 hours, and next year it drops to 40.

  Schreiber says already, he cannot afford to pay overtime. Instead, he's brought in additional workers to spread the hours around. It's allowed him to keep nearly all his workers to 48 hours a week, not more.

This reminds me of how some businesses will cap work hours so that their workers don't qualify as "full-time employees".

In my spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum fantasy land, I would attempt to mitigate this by making all such laws use continuous functions instead of thresholds. This would also resolve a lot of the confusion around income tax brackets.