Labor Department Appeals Ruling Against Overtime Pay Expansion
WASHINGTON (PAI)—Fighting to keep one of the Obama administration’s top pro-worker initiatives alive, the Labor Department announced on Dec. 1 that it would appeal a rural Texas federal judge’s ban on implementation of the Department of Labor’s expansion of worker eligibility for overtime pay.
But DOL’s appeal to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans – an appellate panel stacked, like the Texas federal courts, with GOP-named right wing judges – faces a race against the clock.
Unless that appeals court hears the case before President-elect Donald Trump takes office Jan. 20, that administration’s Republican Labor Department may decide to drop it.
Doing so would strip between 4.2 million and 12.5 million workers nationwide of eligibility for a raise, via overtime pay, they otherwise would have been in line for. The rule had been scheduled to take effect on Dec. 1. The judge’s ruling prevented that.
DOL’s overtime pay rule would have more than doubled the salary above which a worker was ineligible for overtime, from the Bush-era $23,665 to $47,476.
More importantly, DOL redefined the group of exempt “executive, administrative and professional” (EAP) workers who couldn’t get overtime, regardless of their pay level. Bush had expanded it so much that even newspaper editorial assistants couldn’t get overtime pay.
Accepting the arguments of business lobbies, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant decided that DOL overstepped its authority. DOL said it will particularly challenge that part of his ruling, which he extended nationwide. Texas, Nevada, other GOP-run states and the lobbies had sued in Mazzant’s court in Sherman, Texas, to stop the overtime rule.
“The department strongly disagrees with the decision by the court,” DOL said in announcing the appeal. The department’s Overtime Final Rule is the result of a comprehensive, inclusive rule-making process, and we remain confident in the legality of all aspects of the rule.
“The rule updated the standard salary level and provided a method to keep” it current to help better carry out “Congress's intent to exempt bona fide white collar workers from overtime protections. The department always recognized the salary level test works in tandem with the duties tests to identify bona fide EAP employees” and ban them from overtime, DOL added.
The AFL-CIO has had no comment on Mazzant’s Nov. 22 ruling or the appeal. But Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry said after the ruling that “working families have had the rug pulled out from under them right as we go into the holiday season.” She noted that dumping the expanded overtime pay rule would particularly hurt young workers, working women and minorities.”
Christine Owens of the National Employment Law Project said, “The business trade associations and Republican-led states” that sued in Texas “will not ultimately prevail in their attempt to take away a long-overdue pay raise for America’s workers.”
