Fox Business editor: Paying overtime is just more 'giveaways' to the 'permanent minimum wage club'

The hosts of Outnumbered argued on Wednesday that the Obama administration had been wrong to propose extending overtime protections to five million workers.

Currently, workers who make less than $23,660 are eligible for overtime pay. New rules proposed this week would extend those protections to workers making as much as $50,440 a year.

The New York Timespointed out the changes were long overdue because worker productivity had grown 64 percent since 1979, but median pay for workers had only grown by 9 percent.

Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt explained on Wednesday that she was happy that she was not paid overtime when she started her career.

"I was making 20-some-odd-thousand dollars with my first job as a reporter, and I always said yes to everything that they asked me to do," she recalled. "And that might have been staying until 2 a.m., you just do it because you know that if you are the 'yes girl' or 'yes guy' then you are just going to continue to excel. And you're going to get the next raise. And with the next contract, you can ask for more money."

Co-host Sandra Smith noted that former McDonald's CEO Ed Rensi had told Fox News that "these jobs are not careers."

"These are not end-all, be-alls. This should be a path to a greater lifelong career," Smith opined. "So to say that we need to give these people raises, it's almost like it would encourage them to stay as an hourly employee flipping hamburgers at McDonald's."

"That's a good job when you need it, it's not supposed to be a career."

Fox Business Network stocks editor Elisabeth MacDonald worried that paying overtime would create a "permanent minimum wage club" in America.

"The president is making these moves, he's doing these giveaways just to appease his union base," MacDonald insisted. "I'm really, really convinced of that."

Watch the video below from Fox News' Outnumbered, broadcast July 2, 2015.