New overtime regulations

[kscarbel2]

Fleet Owner  /  November 14, 2016

December 1 is fast approaching. If you’re a fleet owner and that day does not resonate with you, you could be in trouble.

On December 1, 2016 major changes to the overtime rule will be going into effect. The U.S. Department of Labor is changing the overtime exemption regulations and that change has the potential to impact 4.2 million employees who are currently classified as exempt. And I am betting some of them work for you.

By way of review, an exempt employee is one that is not eligible to receive overtime pay for hours worked over 40. Conversely, non-exempt employees have to be paid time and a half for any hours they work over 40 in a week.

The big change is in the dollar threshold of the wage for an exempt employee. Prior to December 1 it is $23,600. After that date it jumps to $47,476. In other words full-time salaried employees who earned $455 a week were not eligible for overtime protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Next month that weekly amount is $913.

The mostly likely place where fleets will see this play out is with their administrative and professional staff and people like dispatchers, clerks, etc.

If you have not started to take steps to address this change, you already are behind the curve. It is going to become even more critical to accurately track hours worked by employee. You may need to put a new process in place to keep a very close eye on hours worked if you want to control overtime expenses and at the same time, ensure that your business does not suffer.

You have several options for dealing with this change:

• Cap hours worked per week at 40

• Pay the additional overtime for your employees who have been impacted by the change

• Raise salaries so they are higher than the threshold

• Move employees from salaried to hourly

There is no one right solution. Each fleet will have to do some calculations to figure out which option makes the most sense in its operation.

One thing you can’t do is ignore the change because that could land you in big trouble. And if you think this is going away, think again. The plan is to update the salary threshold every three years.

More information about the ruling is available at https://www.dol.gov/WHD/overtime/final2016/

 

[kscarbel2]

Overtime rule derailed in court; ATA glad to see rule halted

Commercial Carrier Journal (CCJ)  /  November 28, 2016

A federal judge in Texas last week issued a temporary order blocking new rules governing overtime pay from taking effect just a week before the rule officially became law Dec. 1. The law would have doubled the pay threshold for which salaried employees are exempt from overtime from $23,660 to $47,476.

For trucking companies, that meant dispatchers, back-office workers and any other employees in a salaried position making less than $47,500 a year would have been entitled to overtime pay if they worked more than 40 hours in any given week.

However, Judge Amos J. Mazzant for the Eastern District in Texas halted the rule from taking effect pending lawsuits in 21 states challenging the rule’s legality. Barring a higher court reversing Mazzant’s order, the rules likely are dead in the water, as President-elect Donald Trump presumably will choose to either strike the new overtime provisions unilaterally or simply choose to not defend the lawsuits brought against it.

The Department of Labor in 2014 finalized the rule, giving employers two years to prepare.

The American Trucking Associations issued a statement last week saying Mazzant’s decision is a win for trucking companies.

“By doubling the threshold from its current level of $23,660 to $47,476 as of December 1, the rule would have forced millions of salaried professionals to be treated like hourly employees,” said ATA President and CEO Chris Spear. “In the trucking industry, the rule change would have affected countless salaried dispatchers and other managers who need the flexibility to work as the need arises, in response to unpredictable operational demands. At the same time, it would have forced the carriers they work for to begin micromanaging their time.”

 

[BillyT]

Around 2000, my youngest son had just graduated from college and was an "assistant paint manager", salaried of course. He worked for Lowe's in Gainesville Florida. When the lower paid managers worked over 40 hrs they received less than minimum wage per hour! They jokingly called it "Chinese overtime" this went on for several months,and one payday he received a check that was much larger than he expected! He asked his manager what was going on and was told that someone had sued Lowe's and the the extra money was the difference between what he was paid and what he should have been paid legally! Lowe's of course tried to keep it quiet and just "slip" the employees their money! I predict we will be hearing a lot more on this issue in the future, This has the potential to affect the big employers (exploiters) like Wal Mart heavily!