BATON ROUGE – Attorney General Jeff Landry has joined a coalition of 21 states in filing a federal court complaint challenging the United States Department of Labor’s new overtime rule.
If implemented, the new rule will more than double the minimum salary overtime threshold (from $455/wk to $913/wk) for public and private workers. The complaint urges the court to prevent the implementation of the new rule before it takes effect, which is scheduled for December 1, 2016.
“Once again, the President has circumvented Congress and attempted to legislate through executive mandate,” said General Landry. “Like Obamacare before it, this latest overreach will force employers to hire less people and cut hours of their existing workers. This red-taped bureaucratic edict will especially hurt the Louisiana workforce in the education, retail, government, health, hospitality and professional service industries. For their sake and the sake of federalism, I have joined Attorneys General from across the country to stop this job-killer.”
In addition to Louisiana, the other states that joined this filing are Nevada, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.
President Barack Obama ordered the Department of Labor in 2014 to revise the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime exemption for executive, administrative and professional employees – the so-called “white collar” exemption – to account for the federal minimum wage. On May 23, 2016, the Department of Labor issued the final new overtime rule. It doubles the salary-level threshold for employees to be exempt from overtime – regardless of whether if they perform executive, administrative, or professional duties. After December 1, 2016, all employees are entitled to overtime if they earn less than $913 a week – including state and local government employees. Additionally, the new rule contains a ratcheting mechanism to automatically increase the salary-level every three years without going through the standard rule-making process required by federal law.
