Dive Transient:
- 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 underneath the Honest 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. Department of Labor, vacating and setting apart the ultimate rule. Cummings’ resolution got here simply over one month after one other Texas choose similarly vacated and set 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 appeal of the choice within the State of Texas case final 12 months. DOL’s public affairs workers 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 through 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 said that the rule was effectively “dead” regardless of DOL’s State of Texas attraction due to the Trump administration’s conservative coverage stance on extra time.
In actual fact, 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 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 presently set to March 7.
The April 2024 final rule proposed a two-step course of that might have finally raised the minimal annual wage threshold for extra time pay eligibility underneath the FLSA from $35,568 to $58,656 by Jan. 1, 2025. The rule would then have applied a mechanism for mechanically adjusting the brink each three years utilizing present wage information starting in July 2027.
However a sequence of Texas court docket choices froze the rule. The choose in State of Texas held that the rule exceeded DOL’s authority and was illegal. Likewise, Cummings mentioned in his resolution that he discovered the State of Texas choose’s reasoning “persuasive,” and he adopted the same reasoning in ruling for the plaintiffs.
There’s some intrigue in how the fifth Circuit may rule on the 2 appealed judgments provided that the court docket signed off on DOL’s overall use of a salary basis test 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 court docket did maintain, nonetheless, that DOL “can not enact guidelines that exchange or swallow the which means” of the FLSA’s textual content, including that exact wage threshold might increase authorized points due to their dimension.
