Doubling the overtime income threshold will make hundreds of thousands of new employees entitled to overtime pay.
Vice President, Joe Biden, says the “middle class is getting clobbered” and predicts the Department of Labor’s revised overtime regulations (which are expected to be signed today) should go a long way to fixing that.
Amending the Department of Labor’s overtime regulations has been on President Obama’s “lame-duck” agenda for a while now. Despite ample opposition from businesses the Department of Labor is moving forward and making one of the biggest changes to wage laws in years. The revised rule is expected to be signed today and will go into effect on December 1, 2016.
Up until today, any employee earning less than $23,360 per year had to be paid time and a half for any hours worked over 40 regardless of his or her job or title. With the Department of Labor’s passage of its new regulation, that threshold will double to $47,476! This is great news for American workers across the board but especially in industries where wages have stagnated while expectations and hours of work have increased. This also means that we will likely see entirely new professions fall under the protections of the law that otherwise would not have.
Annual pay is not the only thing that impacts whether or not employees are entitled to overtime but it is a big one. Employees earning more than $47,476 may still be entitled to overtime pay if they do not fall within one of the exemptions. Determining exemption eligibility is tricky and may require seeking the advice of lawyer. Remember, however, the Fair Labor Standards Act was intended to be broad and overtime laws were intended to be the rule rather than the exception.
