After a federal judge filed an injunction against the Obama administration’s controversial overtime rule at the end of last year, the new Trump administration revealed it wants to rework the rule and give it another shot.
However, as an article in CNN Money by Julia Horowitz explained, the new overtime rule would likely look a lot different.
Back in May 2016, the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor announced the Fair Labor Standards Act, which “guarantees a minimum wage for all hours worked during the workweek and overtime premium pay of not less than one and one-half times the employee's regular rate of pay for hours worked over 40 in a work week.”
One of the main features of the final rule, which can be found in the Federal Register here, is that it increased the White Collar Exemption salary threshold from $455/workweek (or $23,660 for a full-year worker) to $913/workweek (or $47,476 for a full-year worker).
But barely more than a week before taking effect, a federal judge blocked the new overtime labor law.
Now, about six months later, the Trump administration is picking the rule back up.
According to an article in Reuters by Robert Iafolla, the Labor Department fought in a federal appeals court on Friday for the right to set the salary threshold rather than defend the rule the Obama administration put out.
If they win the case, they will revisit what the number should be.
From the Reuters piece:
Trump's Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta said during his confirmation hearing in March that the correct threshold might be around $33,000. The Labor Department took initial steps earlier this week to begin developing a new threshold.
In its Friday brief to the New Orleans-based 5th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals, the Labor Department made it clear it did not support the salary threshold developed under Obama.
But the department told the court it was “reluctant” to move forward with the rulemaking necessary to set a new threshold as long as its authority was in question.
