Dive Temporary:
- The U.S. Division of Labor has appealed a Texas federal choose’s 2024 resolution blocking its Biden-era ultimate rule which sought to develop extra time pay protections below the Truthful Labor Requirements Act, in accordance with a Feb. 28 courtroom submitting.
- Final December, Choose Sam Cummings of the U.S. District Courtroom for the Northern District of Texas dominated towards DOL in Flint Avenue, LLC v. U.S. Division of Labor, vacating and setting apart the ultimate rule. Cummings’ resolution got here simply over one month after one other Texas choose equally vacated and put aside the rule in a separate lawsuit filed by the state of Texas and events together with the Plano Chamber of Commerce.
- The attraction takes Flint Avenue to the fifth U.S. Circuit Courtroom of Appeals, the identical courtroom during which DOL filed an attraction of the choice within the State of Texas case final 12 months. DOL’s public affairs employees didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. The U.S. Division of Justice, which represents the DOL, didn’t reply to a request for remark submitted by way of its on-line kind.
Dive Perception:
The Feb. 28 discover of attraction might come as a shock to employers who anticipated the Trump administration to desert the ultimate rule; attorneys who beforehand spoke to HR Dive stated that the rule was successfully “useless” regardless of DOL’s State of Texas attraction due to the Trump administration’s conservative coverage stance on extra time.
The truth is, the brand new administration had already filed motions within the fifth Circuit pertinent to extra time rule litigation. On Jan. 22, two days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, DOJ attorneys despatched a letter to the fifth Circuit requesting a 30-day extension on the deadline set by the courtroom to file a gap transient within the State of Texas attraction. The courtroom granted the request and the company’s submitting deadline is at present set to March 7.
The April 2024 ultimate rule proposed a two-step course of that might have finally raised the minimal annual wage threshold for extra time pay eligibility below the FLSA from $35,568 to $58,656 by Jan. 1, 2025. The rule would then have carried out a mechanism for robotically adjusting the brink each three years utilizing present wage knowledge starting in July 2027.
However a sequence of Texas courtroom selections froze the rule. The choose in State of Texas held that the rule exceeded DOL’s authority and was illegal. Likewise, Cummings stated in his resolution that he discovered the State of Texas choose’s reasoning “persuasive,” and he adopted the identical reasoning in ruling for the plaintiffs.
There may be some intrigue in how the fifth Circuit would possibly rule on the 2 appealed judgments on condition that the courtroom signed off on DOL’s general use of a wage foundation check for figuring out extra time pay eligibility in final 12 months’s Mayfield v. U.S. Division of Labor. The Mayfield plaintiffs alleged that the wage foundation check had no foundation within the FLSA’s textual content, however the fifth Circuit disagreed. The courtroom did maintain, nonetheless, that DOL “can’t enact guidelines that change or swallow the which means” of the FLSA’s textual content, including that individual wage threshold might increase authorized points due to their measurement.