President Obama doing big things with the proposed changes to FLSA overtime regulation. Looking to raise the threshold for exempt employees from $23,700 to $50,400. That could be HUGE. And I'm sure I'm about to learn more about it then I could ever want. More at LINK Best article that I could find to link to that wasn't an email from SHRM (An HR website).
$24K seems awfully low to be exempt from OT. Couldn't tell if new rules would mean time and a half or just straight pay.
From my understanding, the $24k was a decent amount back in the 1970's when they set it. But Congress has some kind of a weird issue with making things automatically get inflation adjusted. It creates so many absurdities.
$24K, or the new threshold, is the amount below which you MUST pay overtime. If you make more than that, it depends on the nature of your job. And it is time and a half.
The retail industry will be among those that are impacted the most. My last two years at Texas State I worked fulltime as an Assistant Manager for a store at the outlets. There were three other assistant managers and the store manager. During peak seasons (Easter, Memorial Day, Tax Free Weekend, Black Friday, and Christmas) we would easily work over 65 hours a week. And during regular weeks 50+ hours wasn't uncommon. My salary was $19k the first year and $20k the second. EXEPMT status and zero OT. And based off of the Duties Test, I still should've been non-exempt regardless of what my salary was. Even though I had far more money in pocket then my roommates and friends at the time, I had no idea that I was actually being screwed. There's no telling how many people this is still happening to that have no clue. They should add this type of stuff to the FLSA Minimum Wage posters that employers are required to display. The average person making < $24k a year probably has zero knowledge of this.
One of the criticisms of "some economists" were that the change would have "negligible economic impact" because employers would ignore the rules and commit wage fraud... An actual point raised on why the President shouldn't do it (or at least get **** for trying to do it).
I never understood that argument Doesn't matter if you make it law.. . people just gonna break it What it really means is . . they don't want to bother with ENFORCING IT EQUALLY Rocket River
TL;DR Texas Circuit ****ed the underpaid salaried worker. Added the judge selection process as an interesting aside... Overtime Rule Is but the Latest Obama Initiative to End in Texas Court A federal judge’s injunction this week halted a Labor Department rulethat would have made millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay. Over the last two years, Federal District Court judges in the state have chipped away at Mr. Obama’s legacy by striking down or suspending no fewer than five regulations, executive orders or actions, and guidelines, including an action that would have allowed illegal immigrants who are parents of United States citizens to remain in the country, and guidance that would have expanded restroom access for transgender students. The injunction in the overtime case, issued on Tuesday by a judge nominated by Mr. Obama, has many advocates and legal experts concerned. “It’s a troubling trend because it’s essentially delegating policy oversight to a set of handpicked judges in the South, who can pick and choose which regulations move forward and which do not,” said Matthew Wessler, a principal at the firm Gupta Wessler who has argued multiple cases involving workers before the Supreme Court. The case over the overtime rule, which would have made an estimated 4.2 million people newly eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay, provides some insight into why opponents of regulation conclude that descending on Texas increases their odds of success. In an interview, the Nevada attorney general, Adam Paul Laxalt, whose state was the lead plaintiff in the case against the overtime rule, said that the coalition of states it led had elected to file in the Eastern District of Texas because the district had a reputation for handing down rulings quickly. “That was what is known as a fast docket,” Mr. Laxalt said. “The decision was made based on a bunch of variables, but we thought we may be able to get the quickest answer.” Citing the Dec. 1 effective date for the new regulation, he said, “We were really fighting the clock.” Mr. Laxalt added that Nevada had been part of multistate litigation that was filed in other states, including a case over a rule regulating waterways, which was filed in North Dakota. ... While federal judges in Texas are officially appointed by the president, not state officials, Senate custom gives the state’s two United States senators considerable influence over the nominations. “The judges that do manage to get nominated have to somehow pass through the gauntlet of Ted Cruz and John Cornyn,” said Richard Levy, the secretary-treasurer of the state A.F.L.-C.I.O. who served as its legal director for more than 20 years. “It has skewed the bench here in a way I don’t think is probably likely in other places.” Even though the federal judge who ruled on the overtime regulation, Amos L. Mazzant III, was formally nominated by Mr. Obama in 2014, the influence of Mr. Cruz and Mr. Cornyn made it unlikely that he would be overly sympathetic to federal regulations, Mr. Levy said. Still, the sweep of Judge Mazzant’s decision appears to have surprised even skeptics of the regulation. The Obama regulation raised the annual salary limit below which workers are automatically eligible for overtime pay — something that previous administrations, including George W. Bush’s, had done several times since 1938 — to $47,476, from $23,660. In his ruling, however, Judge Mazzant suggested not simply that the administration lacked the authority to raise the salary limit so high, but that no administration had the authority to establish and raise a salary limit of any kind. ... For his part, Thomas E. Perez, the labor secretary, argued in an interview that it simply was not possible to single out the Obama salary limit as extreme or arbitrary while accepting the previous increases, since the new limit was in line with some of them. “If we had simply indexed the 1975 threshold to inflation, that number would be well in excess of what our current threshold is,” he said — about $57,000 annually. The administration is widely expected to appeal the ruling, given the extensive history of such increases, and many management-side lawyers believed that Judge Mazzant was out on a limb. “The Labor Department has been setting these minimums since 1940,” said Allan Bloom of the law firm Proskauer Rose. “This is the first time that a district court judge is essentially saying you don’t have the authority to do that.”
This is something that has been frequently done by past admins, red and blue. Even the judge's reasoning is sketch.