By Adam Geller
The Associated Press

The complaints began even before University of Missouri administrators e-mailed more than 400 employees to confirm what might seem a harmless change - soon, the memo said, they'd be eligible for overtime pay.

It was not what Mary Porter wanted to hear. It had taken Porter 35 years to climb the university's ladder, from the copy machine operator's job she started just out of high school, to a position with the salary, benefits and responsibility certifying her as a professional. Now the grandmother of three saw the university, armed with new government rules on overtime pay, pulling the ladder's top rungs out from under her.

"It just feels like, in a sense, I've had something taken away from me," said Porter, an administrative associate. "I had that (salaried) status because I worked my way up. ... It made me feel personally like I had accomplished something."

The Bush administration's new rules on overtime pay have been at the center of a furious, and still unresolved, debate over charges they will cost millions of workers the right to overtime pay. But some employers are catching flak of a variety few expected - not from workers angry about losing overtime pay, but from some irritated about a change that gives them the right to receive it.

"Not every company saw this coming, and I certainly don't think the regulators had a sense that this was going to happen," said Jonathan Sulds, an attorney with corporate law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP in New York.

The changes, which took effect Aug. 23 despite vehement criticism by labor unions, are focused mainly on skilled and white-collar jobs, exempting many such positions from eligibility for overtime pay.

Workers earning less than $23,660 a year must be paid for overtime under the new rules. Workers earning more than $100,000 and whose jobs regularly include at least one administrative or professional responsibility will now be excluded from overtime eligibility.

But the new rules, part of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, are complex and leave much to interpretation.

Nobody really knows how many workers will be affected, or how they will be impacted.