In following up on our EAlert from August, the United States Department of Labor (DOL) has officially published its proposed rule in the federal register to change the salary threshold requirements under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Among the “highlights” include:
- Increasing the FLSA regulations’ standard salary level from $684 per week ($35,568 per year) to $1,059 per week ($55,068 per year) for Executive, Administrative or Professional (EAP) positions;
- Increasing the total annual compensation requirement for Highly Compensated Employees (HCE) from $107,432 per year to $143,988 per year;
- Restoring overtime protections for U.S. territories, ensuring workers in those territories where the FLSA minimum wage applies have the same overtime protections as other U.S. workers;
- Automatically updating earnings thresholds every three years so they keep pace with changes in worker salaries, ensuring that employers could adapt more easily because they would know when salary updates would happen and how they would be calculated.
Additionally, the DOL has also published an initial set of Frequently Asked Questions to some initial concerns brought forth by this rule. They can be found here.
Most notably, the proposed rule does not incorporate any changes to the “duties” tests for what is considered an “Executive”, “Administrative” or “Professional” employee under the FLSA.
With the rule now published, employers are free to comment on the proposed rule until November 7th via the government’s regulatory website – regulations.gov.
After the comment period has closed, the DOL will then review the comments and contemplate whether to make any changes (or not) before finalizing the rule.
Should the proposed rule be adopted as presently written, the rule “would become effective 60 days after publication of a final rule.” However, this timeline could change in the final rule itself or could put on hold by way of litigation challenging the rule altogether (which many suggest is likely).
We’ll keep you posted as developments unfold.