06 September, 2017
The contentious overtime rule, which would have made about 4 million new workers eligible for time-and-a-half pay, called for salary thresholds to double and for any salaried employee making less than $47,476 to be eligible for overtime.
The Trump administration can appeal, but is not expected to and instead has said it will clarify overtime rules sometime in the future.
"The Obama administration's drastic changes to the federal overtime rule would have hurt small businesses and their employees", Amador said in a statement. The DOJ initially asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to affirm its authority in the overtime matter.
A few months later in September 2016, two separate lawsuits (later combined into one) were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Mazzant's court, which resulted in the judge issuing a temporary injunction preventing the overtime rule from going into effect on December 1, 2016, as originally planned.
"Judge Mazzant's ruling yesterday should give the DOL time to do what it says it wants to do in terms of opening new rulemaking and setting a salary level somewhere between the current $455/week and the $913/week that was set in the Obama Administration rule", said the legal team at management-side firm Constangy, Brooks, Smith, & Profete in a September 1 client bulletin. In an email, the president of American Bridge accused Trump of trying to "further rig the economy for the rich".
Sources told Bloomberg BNA that the government could still appeal the ruling, perhaps to seek clarity on how and when the DOL can use workers' salaries for overtime eligiblity determinations. Yesterday, a Texas federal court ruled in favor of the 55 state and business plaintiffs who challenged the rule. "Clearly, they have other agenda items that are more high priority than updating the overtime rules".
The Fair Labor Standards Act generally requires employers to pay workers overtime for all hours worked beyond 40 per week. When the DOL rolled out the new rule in 2015, then-Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said doubling the threshold was the easiest way to put more money in workers' pockets and avoid some of the uncertainty that comes with the "duties test". According to the district court, the FLSA permits the DOL to impose a minimum salary-based test as a way to identify employees who may qualify for a duties-based analysis, but, by increasing the salary threshold by so much, the DOL effectively replaced the duties test with a predominantly salary-based standard that is not endorsed by the statute.
