Dive Transient:
- The U.S. Division of Labor has appealed a Texas federal decide’s 2024 determination blocking its Biden-era ultimate rule which sought to broaden time beyond regulation pay protections underneath 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 in opposition to 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 enchantment takes Flint Avenue to the fifth U.S. Circuit Courtroom of Appeals, the identical courtroom by which DOL filed an enchantment 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 enchantment 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 “lifeless” regardless of DOL’s State of Texas enchantment due to the Trump administration’s conservative coverage stance on time beyond regulation.
In truth, the brand new administration had already filed motions within the fifth Circuit pertinent to time beyond regulation 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 temporary within the State of Texas enchantment. The courtroom granted the request and the company’s submitting deadline is at the moment set to March 7.
The April 2024 ultimate rule proposed a two-step course of that may have finally raised the minimal annual wage threshold for time beyond regulation pay eligibility underneath 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 choices froze the rule. The decide in State of Texas held that the rule exceeded DOL’s authority and was illegal. Likewise, Cummings stated 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 may 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 time beyond regulation 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 courtroom did maintain, nevertheless, 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 dimension.
