Dive Temporary:
- The U.S. Division of Labor has appealed a Texas federal decide’s 2024 determination blocking its Biden-era closing rule which sought to develop extra time pay protections underneath the Honest Labor Requirements Act, in keeping with a Feb. 28 court docket submitting.
- Final December, Decide Sam Cummings of the U.S. District Courtroom 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 Courtroom of Appeals, the identical court docket wherein DOL filed an attraction 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 type.
Dive Perception:
The Feb. 28 discover of attraction could 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 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 attraction. The court docket granted the request and the company’s submitting deadline is presently set to March 7.
The April 2024 closing 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 robotically 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 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’s some intrigue in how the fifth Circuit would possibly rule on the 2 appealed judgments provided 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 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 substitute or swallow the that means” of the FLSA’s textual content, including that exact wage threshold could elevate authorized points due to their dimension.
