Dive Temporary:
- The U.S. Division of Labor has appealed a Texas federal decide’s 2024 determination blocking its Biden-era last rule which sought to increase additional time pay protections below the Truthful Labor Requirements Act, in response to a Feb. 28 court docket submitting.
- Final December, Decide Sam Cummings of the U.S. District Court docket 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’ determination got here simply over one month after one other Texas decide 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 Court docket of Appeals, the identical court docket through which DOL filed an attraction of the choice within the State of Texas case final yr. 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 mentioned that the rule was successfully “useless” regardless of DOL’s State of Texas attraction due to the Trump administration’s conservative coverage stance on additional time.
Actually, the brand new administration had already filed motions within the fifth Circuit pertinent to additional 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 court docket to file a gap transient within the State of Texas attraction. The court docket granted the request and the company’s submitting deadline is at present set to March 7.
The April 2024 last rule proposed a two-step course of that will have ultimately raised the minimal annual wage threshold for additional time pay eligibility below the FLSA from $35,568 to $58,656 by Jan. 1, 2025. The rule would then have applied a mechanism for mechanically adjusting the edge each three years utilizing present wage knowledge starting in July 2027.
However a collection of Texas court docket selections froze the rule. The decide in State of Texas held that the rule exceeded DOL’s authority and was illegal. Likewise, Cummings mentioned in his determination that he discovered the State of Texas decide’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 court docket signed off on DOL’s total use of a wage foundation check for figuring out additional time pay eligibility in final yr’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 court docket did maintain, nonetheless, that DOL “can not enact guidelines that change or swallow the which means” of the FLSA’s textual content, including that exact wage threshold might elevate authorized points due to their dimension.
