Category: Wage & Hour

Last June, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that was reinstating Wage & Hour Opinion Letters. The agency also revamped its website where Opinion Letters and other guidance live. See https://www.dol.gov/whd/opinion/guidance.htm Now, the DOL has reissued more than a dozen advisory opinion letters that had been published late in George W. Bush’s administration but then rescinded by the Obama DOL. These letters could give employers guidance...

Last Friday, the United States Department of Labor made the following announcement: “On Dec. 19, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit became the fourth federal appellate court to expressly reject the U.S. Department of Labor’s six-part test for determining whether interns and students are employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Department of Labor today clarified that going forward, the Department will conform...

In a move that surprised many observers, on October 30, 2017, the United States Department of Labor appealed a federal judge's August ruling striking down the Obama-era overtime regulations.  In a statement issued by the DOL, the agency explained that it will also file a motion to freeze the appeal while it undertakes further rule making on what the appropriate salary level  for exempt status should be. Here's a quick recap on how we got to this...

Barely more than 24 hours after we published a blog telling you there was little new to report on the Department of Labor's proposed changes to overtime regulations, something big happened:  a federal judge in Texas struck the proposed rules down.  Granting summary judgment to more than 55 business groups that challenged the rule, Judge Amos Mazzant ruled that the drastic increase in the salary required to be exempt -- from $23,660 to $47,476 - was...

You may recall that I blogged on the stalled DOL overtime rules a month or so ago, with the Trump DOL repeatedly asking for extensions to file a brief in the Fifth Circuit. In that brief,   administration lawyers told the Fifth Circuit that the DOL intends to revise the overtime rule and asked the court to affirm the DOL’s right to use salary levels to determine eligibility for overtime pay.   DOL lawyers stated that the Department will not...