T he Biden administration has been putting in extra hours to quash the burgeoning trend of employment flexibility, and its latest effort is overhauling overtime rules.

It may sound like a good deal for workers if it means they get more pay — and certainly, that’s how the administration is selling it. In reality, though, imposing an overtime-pay mandate makes it harder for employers and workers to figure out alternative arrangements that benefit them both. For example, an employee will no longer be able to put in extra hours in exchange for working from home or getting longer weekends.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) says employees must be paid time-and-a-half once they work more than 40 hours in a week. However, businesses may exempt workers from the requirement if their duties are “managerial” in nature and they also reach a certain salary threshold. The new Labor Department rule sets that salary threshold, currently $35,000 annually, to more than $44,000 starting in July and almost $59,000 starting next year, thus bringing more workers into the mandate. This, incidentally, disregards the text of the statute by avoiding the capacity in which employees are paid.

In short, far fewer workers — the administration estimates nearly 293,000 — will be exempt from overtime rules, meaning that businesses will have to start paying substantially more to people who work more than 40 hours in a week, regardless of what employers or workers might prefer.

In the real world, it’s extremely unlikely that all (or even most) of those 293,000 workers will start getting paid time-and-a-half. Sure, larger businesses might be able to absorb some higher labor costs, but the medium and small ones likely will not. Businesses have often sidestepped overtime requirements whenever they could because of the expense. Now, they’ll likely monitor work hours more closely and cut off workers before they reach 40-hour point, so workers will not get the overtime, after all.

Acting (and unconfirmed) Labor secretary Julie Su argued, “Too often, lower-paid salaried workers are doing the same job as their hourly counterparts but are spending more time away from their families for no additional pay. That is unacceptable.” Major regulatory changes like this should be written into the law by Congress, not added by a labor secretary who doesn’t yet have congressional confirmation.

What Su doesn’t consider is who was making the choice. She assumes overtime hours were foisted on workers, but it could just as easily have been a deal struck between the worker and the employer. Flexibility is prized by workers in the current economy, and offering it is a way for employers to fill positions when they cannot offer additional pay. Maybe the manager will offer, “Stay ‘til closing while we’re having the big sale, and then you can take Tuesday off.” Or perhaps the worker will ask, “I’ll promise to have it done by the end of the week if you let me do it at home and avoid the commute.” The Covid-19 pandemic only accelerated this flexible-work trend. Such arrangements would require overtime under the new rule when the whole point of the arrangements was to avoid that.

It’s not even like individual workers were clamoring for this new mandate. As the department itself noted in the rulemaking, the new rule was backed by “labor unions, worker advocacy groups, [and] plaintiff-side law firms.” These groups claim to represent workers, but their advocacy is based on the traditional employment rules that mandated the 40-hour week. These groups oppose alternative work arrangements, especially individual agreements worked out between workers and employers, because they don’t have influence over them.

Unions and other advocacy groups have been relentless in their effort to stamp out these alternative arrangements. During the Obama administration, they pushed the Labor Department to set the threshold to $47,000, up from $23,000. The rulemaking was challenged by business groups, and a Texas court nullified the Obama rule in a 2017 ruling, saying the administration “exceeded its authority.”

The Trump administration did its own rulemaking and set the threshold at $35,500. Then–Labor secretary Alexander Acosta said he thought raising it to $47,000 caused a “stress on the system,” but the lower figure represented an acceptable compromise.

Finding middle ground on the issue is not the current White House’s approach, which has by and large turned its labor policy over to activists like Su and labor-union allies. The idea of letting workers make or negotiate these choices on their own eludes them.