A lawsuit filed Tuesday by Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt and joined by 20 other states challenges the legality of new overtime rules implemented by the Obama administration and set to take effect December 1.
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Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Tuesday he is joining his counterpart in Nevada, Adam Laxalt, to file the lawsuit on behalf of 21 states.
If implemented, the new rule will more than double the minimum salary overtime threshold for public and private workers without Congressional authorization.
“Once again, President Obama is trying to unilaterally rewrite the law”, Paxton said in a statement.
The NFIB asks for more time, until June 2017, for businesses to “prepare for the unintended consequences of the rule”, Ferruso said.
Their lawsuit argues the rule is unconstitutional because it dictates wages states must pay employees for government functions, and say the change would upset the state budgeting process by requiring states to pay overtime to more employees.
The lawsuit urges the court to prevent the implementation of the new rule before it takes effect.
The change would make 4.2 million more salaried workers eligible for overtime pay. “President Obama in 2014 directed the Secretary of Labor to update the overtime regulations “.to reflect the original intent of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and to simplify and modernize the rules so they’re easier for workers and businesses to understand and apply”, federal officials wrote in their primer.
SC is joining 20 other states in challenging new federal overtime rules set to go into effect before the end of the year.
The lawsuit specifically claims that the rule is too broad because it is based on the salary threshold.
The new rule announced in May would raise that bar to $47,000, affecting about four million American workers. “The President does not have the authority to dictate to Oklahoma or any other state how they should budget state employee salaries”, Attorney General Pruitt said. The effects of the law’s overtime protections have eroded over time, he said.
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The measure would shrink the so-called “white collar exemption” that exempts workers who perform “executive, administrative or professional” duties from overtime and minimum wage requirements. The DOL also took the unprecedented step of setting the threshold to automatically update every three years using the same flawed methodology. Many employers have complained it will drive up their costs and cause them to cut workers’ hours, slow hiring of full-time staff and turn salaried workers into hourly employees.
