Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in the Bloomberg Law Daily Labor Report, in “Overtime Expansion ‘Daring’ Businesses to Sue Over Pay Threshold,” by Rebecca Rainey.
Following is an excerpt:
A highly anticipated US Labor Department proposal to expand overtime protections to more workers already faces the threat of litigation as it navigates a similar gauntlet over salary thresholds that ultimately struck down an Obama-era rule.
Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su announced Wednesday that the proposed rule would give “millions more salaried workers the right to overtime protections if they earn less than $55,000 a year.”
But a lengthy footnote in the text of the rulemaking indicates that the salary figure under which workers will automatically be owed time-and-a-half pay could be as high as $60,209 in the final version of the rule, aggravating some members of the regulated community.
Even a seemingly small change in the pay threshold for overtime could mean that a larger number of workers would qualify for overtime protections under the final regulation, and in turn, would mean that employers could see a corresponding increase in payroll costs.
Management-side attorneys said going even higher than the $55,000 proposal puts a rulemaking already vulnerable to legal challenges on shakier ground. Industry groups were already primed to sue over the rule change given the precedent set by a 2017 decision that killed a DOL effort to update the threshold during the Obama administration.
“It’s important not to lose sight of this preview of where the Department seems to intend to go with the Final Rule. They are basically daring the business community to sue,” said Paul DeCamp, a former Wage and Hour administrator turned management-side attorney with Epstein Becker & Green P.C.
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