Share
While the nation’s attention is riveted on politics, and particularly the presidential campaign, workers and their allies have been winning key executive branch and agency rulings. But corporations and their supporters are battling workers’ advocates and the Obama administration in the courts in at least one case.
Their object, as usual: To roll back workers’ wages and overtime pay.
The workers’ wins have come mostly at the federal level, through executive action. One major effort expands eligibility for overtime pay to millions of people previously excluded. Corporations are challenging the overtime pay rule in court and in Congress.
Led by Nevada and Texas, 21 Republican-run states are suing in federal court in a rural area of Texas to halt the overtime pay expansion. The states argue DOL’s new rule illegally covers professional, administrative and executive workers, up to the new pay level of $47,476 yearly, besides regular workers. Their argument is that the federal rule infringes on states’ rights.
Business groups back GOP legislation to delay DOL’s overtime rule, but Obama promised last month that if Congress tries to revoke it, he’ll veto their bill.
“As a consequence of the new salary level test, tens of thousands of state employees and millions of private employees ‘employed in a bona fide [executive, administrative or professional] capacity’ will now have their overtime exempt status eliminated, with no change in their actual duties, based solely upon the amount of salary,” the states charge. They want the federal judge to halt the rule by Oct. 25.
“This lawsuit is a slap in the face to working people in Michigan,” replied Texas AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber, after his state’s attorney general, a Republican, joined the Texas suit.
“By suing to stop the Obama administration’s new overtime rule, Bill Schuette is putting himself squarely on the side of corporate CEOs who want to continue denying overtime pay to Michigan’s working men and women. That’s just wrong,” Bieber said.
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the new regulation will benefit 12.5 million workers nationwide. In 1975, more than 60 percent of all salaried employees were entitled to overtime protection, but today it’s only eight percent.