The Department of Labor’s ham-handed attempt to raise wages through regulation has been halted for now. On Tuesday a federal judge for the Eastern District of Texas issued an injunction halting the implementation of the Overtime Rule, which would have taken effect on December 1. The rule would have reclassified about 4 million workers as eligible for overtime pay. In his order, Judge Amos Mazzant, said state plaintiffs would likely succeed on the merits because the rule “ignores completely Congress’s intent by raising the minimum salary threshold such that it supplants the duties test […] [.] [I]f Congress intended the salary requirement to supplant the duties test, then Congress, and not the Department, should make that change.” As Danielle Zaychik has written, employers have lots of ways of offsetting the cost of higher overtime pay, and those moves would be detrimental to the workers the law aims to help. These options include shifting workers from salaries to hourly wages, reducing their hours, and reducing their benefits.
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