News & Commentary August 31, 2023 Ben Sachs spoke with Harvard Law Today about the labor movement

https://onlabor.org/august-31-2023/

By Michelle Berger

Michelle Berger is a student at Harvard Law School.

In today’s News and Commentary: The DOL proposed making millions more workers eligible for overtime pay; Ben Sachs spoke with Harvard Law Today about the labor movement’s momentum; and the NLRB overruled key aspects of a Trump-era precedent on unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment and returned to the pre-Trump-era standard for determining whether worker activities are protected under the Act.

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay workers time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours a week, but it exempts salaried workers working in a “bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity” if those workers make above a threshold amount per year. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, the FLSA mandates that the DOL set the salary level below which workers qualify for overtime pay –– a hugely important metric, because a too-low threshold that does not account for inflation contributes to wage stagnation for workers. AP reports that, in the 1970s, 60% of salaried workers were entitled to overtime pay. But with the current threshold of $35,568 per year (a number set by the Trump Administration, which raised the threshold from $23,660), only about 15% of salaried workers are entitled to overtime pay. The Obama administration had set the threshold at more than $47,000, but a district court in Texas blocked the change on the grounds that it ignored the “job duties” element of the FLSA overtime exemption and in effect “categorically exclude[d]” certain workers from the exemption “based on salary level alone.”

Yesterday, the DOL under President Biden has proposed to raise the overtime exemption salary threshold to $55,000 per year, a change which is estimated to bring 3.6 million workers under the protection of the FLSA’s overtime mandate. With this change, 27% of salaried workers would be eligible for overtime pay. Challenges from the business community are imminent.

FULL story at link above.