ABC Praises Injunction Against Overtime Rule

Locally, Todd Tranum, president and CEO for the Chautauqua County Chamber of Commerce, said local businesses have received information and are aware of the ruling.

Because the injunction came so late in the game, most restaurant companies had probably already done the hard work of analysis and figured out how they could comply with the new regulations, she said.

On Tuesday, Nevada Attorney General Adam Paul Laxalt announced that a U.S. District Court preliminarily enjoined the U.S. Department of Labor’s new overtime rule.

The injunction was a response to a suit filed months ago by 21 states and more than 50 business groups protesting the change, citing irreparable damage from having to pay a large portion of workers more either in terms of a salary raise or for overtime costs, and having to lay off some employees to be able to pay others. The president’s goal was to update the overtime regulations by increasing the salary limits, keeping the overtime law current with inflation.

The overtime rule allows nondiscretionary bonuses and incentive payments (including commissions) to satisfy up to 10 percent of the standard salary level test requirement. By 2014, that number shrunk to 7 percent. The rule also indexed the salary threshold to inflation; previously it could be raised only through the cumbersome process of issuing a proposed and then final Labor Department rule, a process that typically takes at least one year, the article continued.

Business owners who have already increased salaries, or switched workers to hourly status, now face the decision of whether to keep those changes in place, or switch employees back to their previous compensation, Tarnow says.

Planning for the new overtime rule was largely for naught after a judge rejected it November 22. The rule was created to extend mandatory overtime pay to more than 4 million salaried workers. The gripe is how much it went up.”There’s no doubt the threshold was long overdue to be updated”, Franklin said”.

“There hasn’t been an adjustment in 12 years”, Tranum said. “It’s going to be a challenge for employers to manage this”. They would have mandated that salaried employees who earn below $47,476 or less would receive 1.5 times the hourly wage that applies to their salary if they worked more than 40 hours within a week.

U.S. Rep. Tom Reed, R-Corning, shared his concerns with the new rule when it was ordered as he said it was a big government overreach, which often plagues small businesses and prevents job creation. “Sometimes they are doing it out of a genuine sense of duty for their company, and a sense of responsibility to their customer, according to Fiore”. It’s not workplace flexibility employers seek, but the ability to continue to exploit low- and moderate-salaried workers.

There were also raises among clerical workers for Opportunity Village in Las Vegas, a nonprofit that teaches vocational skills to people with disabilities and raises its money through private donations and running a thrift store. But using salary as one of the determining factors has now been on the books for more than 70 years, under administrations Democratic and Republican. “Our prices are fixed by state and federal reimbursement levels”.