The lawsuit urges the court to prevent the implementation of the new rule before it takes effect. Since Congress did not specifically ask agencies to use indexing for FLSA regulations, critics of the rule contend that lawmakers did not intend to give the Labor Department indexing authority. Business groups and Republican officials say the rule will force employers to demote salaried workers to hourly positions and create more part-time jobs.
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U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez said in a written statement that he is confident of the legality of the rule, describing the lawsuits as partisan.
The lawsuit alleges that the rule, which would allow millions of Americans to qualify for overtime pay, is unconstitutional. Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said sarcastically that the salary standard had also been raised in the past by “other communists like George W. Bush and Gerald Ford”. “We believe this lawsuit is a necessary step to help protect our members, many of which are small businesses, against unreasonable regulatory overreach by the Department of Labor”.
In addition to OH and Nevada, other plaintiffs include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Iowa, Maine and New Mexico. So Lawrence VanDyke, the state’s solicitor general, said to have the new overtime rules piled on now could have devastating effects, in both the private and public sectors. The lawsuits filed Tuesday echoed those claims.
Paxton and his predecessor, Greg Abbott, have filed a wave of challenges to Obama administration initiatives, including environmental regulations, a plan to provide relief from deportation to certain undocumented immigrants, and a rule to require employers facing union campaigns to disclose dealings with lawyers and consultants.
Obama and others sought to update the rules – last changed in 2004 – to boost store managers, office supervisors and other middle-income, white-collar Americans. That more than doubles the current salary threshold for required overtime. Texas AFL-CIO president John Patrick said the suit showed “zero concern for working people who are forced to put in free hours at the whim of their employers”.
Various representatives of the construction industry have also come out in opposition to the new rules.
On March 13, 2014, President Obama ordered the DOL to revise the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime exemption for executive, administrative and professional employees to account for the federal minimum wage.
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Proctor said state employees haven’t had raises since 2009 and no longer move along a pay scale system because the system was scrapped. Until now, he said, “all of the affected entities, states would say we don’t have the money to do this”.
