Any time your legal team begins to get a handle on overtime issues, it’s usually time for some changes to be afoot. According to Christina Kennedy of Foley & Lardner, the U.S. Department of Labor has been tasked with changing the regulations currently governing overtime pay and proposing new ones.
On Tuesday a write-up of the new regulations was sent to the White House for review. And while only preliminary, the proposed regs can give employers a sense of what to expect:
- OT Expansion: “The goal of the new regulations will be to expand overtime protections (meaning more pay …) to employees,” Kennedy says. The DOL has said publicly that over the years, millions of salaried workers have been left without the guarantee of overtime pay. Employers can expect to see more of their workforce covered under any new regulations.
- Salary Threshold: The $455 weekly salary threshold for workers to meet the white-collar exemption hasn’t been raised since 2004. Kennedy notes it’s a “virtual certainty” that this figure will go up.
- Executive Exemption: As it stands, the managerial exemption to overtime requires an analysis of whether the person’s primary duty is managing employees. If the DOL implements a qualifying percentage of managerial time, that could have a huge effect in the retail and hospitality sectors, “where managers frequently step in and handle nonexempt tasks when needed on the floors,” Kennedy says.
