Dive Transient:
- The U.S. Division of Labor has appealed a Texas federal decide’s 2024 choice blocking its Biden-era last rule which sought to develop extra time pay protections beneath the Truthful Labor Requirements Act, in response to a Feb. 28 court docket submitting.
- Final December, Decide 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’ choice 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 court docket 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 through its on-line type.
Dive Perception:
The Feb. 28 discover of enchantment could 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 extra time.
Actually, 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 enchantment. The court docket granted the request and the company’s submitting deadline is at the moment set to March 7.
The April 2024 last rule proposed a two-step course of that will have finally raised the minimal annual wage threshold for extra time pay eligibility beneath 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 information starting in July 2027.
However a collection of Texas court docket 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 choice that he discovered the State of Texas decide’s reasoning “persuasive,” and he adopted the identical reasoning in ruling for the plaintiffs.
There’s some intrigue in how the fifth Circuit may rule on the 2 appealed judgments on condition that the court docket signed off on DOL’s general use of a wage foundation check for figuring out extra 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, nevertheless, that DOL “can’t enact guidelines that change or swallow the that means” of the FLSA’s textual content, including that individual wage threshold could increase authorized points due to their measurement.
