Free Republic

YAY! :) This was the only event I've watched in full so far at the Olympics and it was SOOOOOOOOO WORTH IT! Went to overtime and then they won in the shootout.

A federal judge in Texas has made permanent an earlier finding that the Obama administration overstepped its bounds by extending overtime pay to 4.2 million workers. U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant in November had issued a preliminary injunction blocking the mandate from the U.S. Labor Department. He struck down the mandate in a permanent order issued Aug. 31. The rule change would have extended overtime protection to salaried employees making less than $47,476 a year. The proposal had employers in a range of industries, including restaurants, scrambling to decide whether to raise the salaries of affected employees to the new...

The various media pundits and news stories are calling H.R. 1180 a “new overtime bill”. However, in reality the ‘take pay or take time off’ concept is more than 50 years old; we used to call it “compensatory time” or “comp time”...... The basic principle can be awesome for employees for a variety of reasons. However, few young workers today have an understanding of how it works. Say you work 60 hours in a week. If ‘compensatory time’ options are available you can take your standard 40 hour paycheck and defer the 20 overtime hours to future time off at...

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez learned a harsh lesson this month. Public servants at federal agencies cannot allow their political preferences to guide their regulatory agenda. Rather, they must fulfill the mission of the agency as Congress intended. The folks over at the Department of Labor (DOL) do not seem to comprehend that. Once again, a court has issued an injunction against a DOL regulation. This time it was President Obama’s signature overtime rule, finalized on May 23, 2016, which would more than double the salary threshold for overtime eligible employees from $23,660 to $47,892. On November 22, 2016, Judge Amos...

Time’s running out on the Obama administration and its ability to extend its regulatory adventurism, an end emphasized by a federal judge in Texas yesterday — or at least a pause. Twenty-one states sued the Department of Labor over new rules that would have extended overtime pay to around four million salaried Americans, and Judge Amos Mazzant issued a temporary injunction to keep it from being enforced as planned on December 1st: (video at link) A Texas judge ruled Tuesday to put the brakes on federal rules that would have expanded overtime pay to more than 4 million workers. A...

Baton Rouge police and the sheriff's office spent a total $1.6 million on overtime pay in July responding to protests that followed the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling by a police officer and a subsequent attack on law enforcement in which three officers were killed. The federal government is picking up more than half of the bill. Most of the money was spent by the police department, which shelled out $1.5 million in overtime pay in July. The sheriff's office spent close to $102,000 on overtime, according to a report from the Louisiana legislative fiscal office. In total, Baton Rouge...

Texas and 20 other states have announced a lawsuit to block the Obama administration’s destructive overtime rules, which are slated to go into effect December 1, 2016. With less than 3-months to spare, victory in the case would save businesses and workers across the U.S. from this dehumanizing and economically damaging law. According to the new rule, salaried workers earning below $47,476 per year must be paid time-and-a-half for work done in excess of forty hours per week. This is up from a previous salary threshold of $23,660. The rule promises more pay for working long hours, more money for...

resident Barack Obama is doing anything but closing out his lame duck term quietly. On the contrary he’s doing yet another end run around both the U.S. Congress and all 50 states that would impose another mandate that will cost money and jobs, possibly forcing states to raise taxes as well. Twenty-one states have filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Sherman, Texas, to stop him. Hours after the states filed their lawsuit, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups filed a similar lawsuit with the same federal court. Obama’s new mandate would force employers in...

A coalition of 21 states sued the U.S. Department of Labor Tuesday over a new rule that would make about 4 million higher-earning workers eligible for overtime pay, slamming the measure as inappropriate federal overreach from the Obama Administration. Republican Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, urging it to block implementation before the regulation takes effect on Dec. 1. Laxalt, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama’s policies, said the rule would burden private and public sectors by straining budgets and forcing layoffs or cuts in working hours. “This rule, pushed...

Four decades after he signed the nation’s first law giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights, California Gov. Jerry Brown will again consider a historic proposal calling for farmworkers to receive the same overtime pay as other hourly workers, after the Assembly approved legislation Monday to phase in the change. California employers are already mandated to pay time-and-a half to farmworkers after 10 hours in a day or 60 hours in a week. That’s longer than the overtime pay for all other workers, who get it after eight hours in a day or 40 hours a week. The Assembly passed the proposal...

CLOVEDALE (CBS SF) — The Mayor of Cloverdale hopes it’s just a misunderstanding, but the Bernie Sanders campaign appears to have left her small town with $23,000 in unpaid bills after it hosted their ‘A Future To Believe In’ rally last June.

With a broad new class of workers becoming eligible for overtime, many small businesses are scrambling to figure out how to factor the regulations into their bottom line. The Obama administration on Wednesday announced the final details of new labor rules to increase the salary cutoff for overtime pay. Although the plan was outlined a year ago and employers have several months to comply, many say the change will be a challenge to small businesses that pride themselves on a scrappy, entrepreneurial culture. “We are pretty flexible,” said Kelli Glasser, who is president and chief executive of Exhibit Concepts, a...

Juggling work and family life is hard. On Wednesday the Labor Department made it even harder for millions of salaried workers. The administration’s new overtime regulations will effectively turn them into hourly employees. The regulation won’t increase their earnings, but it will greatly reduce their control over their schedules. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay hourly workers overtime for working over 40 hours a week. But the Fair Labor Standards Act regulations exempt many salaried employees. This makes sense: Salaried employees get paid to do a particular job, not work particular hours. They also generally have more...

This piece was authored by Townhall intern Catherine Dunn. Coming this December, 4.2 million additional workers will be entitled to overtime benefits. The Obama Administration has pushed the change with great enthusiasm. The Department of Labor’s video, “OVERTIME: It’s About Time” is indicative of the administration’s tone regarding the issue: over cheerful music, Secretary Thomas Perez paints a picture of the new regulation saving millions of workers from exploitation, of the regulation as a wholly positive change that’s long overdue. But it’s not that simple. In a recent study commissioned by the National Retail Federation, the research firm Oxford Economics...

Most bad policies harm the economy in one identifiable way. But the Labor Department’s new overtime rule, released on May 18, harms the economy and the American worker in three different ways. The new rule requires employers to pay white collar workers overtime if they earn less than $47,476 annually, instead of less than $23,660, the case at present. (Manual workers generally have to be paid overtime at all earnings levels.) The effect will be (1) to raise costs to employers, discouraging employment; (2) to prohibit flexible time for employees; and (3) to stunt American productivity and economic growth. Consider...

The Obama administration late Tuesday unveiled a final rule extending overtime pay to millions of workers. The regulation makes anyone earning up to $47,476 a year, or roughly $913 a week, eligible for overtime pay. The rule is one of the most significant regulatory initiatives of President Obama’s second term, and has drawn fierce opposition from industry groups. With the Republican Congress standing firm against a minimum wage increase and other economic proposals from Democrats, the president has exerted the power of the executive branch to try and burnish his legacy. In a concession to business groups, the administration reduced...

Millions more Americans will qualify for overtime pay under a final Labor Department regulation expected out Wednesday, in what could be President Barack Obama’s last big push to try to shore up workers’ wages. The rule will increase the annual salary threshold that generally determines who qualifies for overtime pay when they log more than 40 hours a week. It will have a sweeping effect on workers, employers and industries, including large and small retailers, the fast-food industry, universities and nonprofits. Analysts and industry groups expect the threshold will be doubled to about $47,000 from $23,660—a level last updated in...

On July 6th, the Department of Labor (“DOL”) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking with the potential to affect an untold number of employers. The proposed rule, published in the Federal Register at 80 FR 38515, drastically changes the DOL’s interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act with respect to overtime exemptions. The current rule, put in place in 2004, exempts employees with salaries of at least $455 a week ($23,660 a year) and who perform executive, administrative, professional, outside sales and computer duties from overtime regulations. In a Presidential Memorandum in March of 2014, President Obama directed the DOL...

Back in June a bright, young, soon-to-be Deutsche Bank intern prepared for his first summer on Wall Street. He told us he knew what he was getting into: "Terrible hours." He was right. On this 21-year-old's very first day, he was staffed on a project at 8 p.m. and ended up working until 2:30 a.m. His hours have let up somewhat since, but he rarely leaves before 10:30 p.m. or 11:30 p.m. On weekends, if he's not working and can meet a friend for lunch, he'll choose a table near an open window because the fresh air is such a...

Should salaried employees have to log their hours? President Obama thinks so. He just proposed regulations requiring salaried employees making less than $50,000 a year to track their work time. Most news coverage has not highlighted this aspect of the new overtime regulations. Unfortunately, they will reduce salaried workers’ flexibility — without raising pay. Federal law guarantees hourly workers overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week. The regulations currently exempt many salaried employees. Executive, administrative, and professional employees frequently get paid for the work that is done, not the hours that are logged. These employees get a...