If you like to open your presents on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Department of Labor is for you. Last night, the DOL posted the final revised rule on overtime on its website ahead of its planned announcement this afternoon.
What a gift for employment lawyers! Needless to say, I was up late unwrapping all my
Late Monday, several reports on Twitter indicated that the Department of Labor would be announcing and releasing the final version of the revisions to the white-collar overtime regulations. You can see my prior posts on the subject here and here.
This has been a long time
Over the last few days, Twitter has been a-twittering with buzz that the Department of Labor has sent the final overtime rules to the OMB.
This is the equivalent of one department sending another one an e-mail with the new rules. Why? Because it’s just
It’s hard getting excited about joint employment.
In fact, it’s pretty yawn-inducing. (Seriously, get a cup of coffee before reading this.)
But a few weeks back, the Department of Labor issued some new guidance on the topic that has been making the rounds
Over the next few days, I hope to provide a few updates from attending last week’s ABA Labor & Employment Law Annual Conference in Philadelphia. There were many good, substantive programs there and lots to be gleaned for employers.
One of the sessions focused
Whatever happened to summer vacation? You remember, that downtime, when nothing much happened?
First, there were new proposed OT rules. Then, word came out EARLY (I got an alert at 6a!) today that the U.S. Department of Labor issued new “guidance” that will
Did you enjoy the fireworks last week?
I’m not talking about the real Independence Day fireworks; rather, it’s a new Second Circuit decision that should have employment lawyers popping this morning.
For a while, we’ve been talking about interns. Indeed, back in 2013, I talked about how a wage/hour case involving interns on the movie “Black Swan” had the potential to change how employers use interns.
In that case, a federal district court judge essentially adopted a six-factor test used by the U.S. Department of Labor to determine if an intern was really an employee.
Flash forward to last Thursday. In somewhat of a surprise, the Second Circuit — which covers cases in Connecticut — reversed that federal district court court’s decision and rejected the DOL’s six-factor approach.
In its place, the court adopted what Jon Hyman properly termed, a “more flexible and nuanced primary-benefit test.”
[T]he proper question is whether the intern or the employer is the primary beneficiary of the relationship. The primary beneficiary test has two salient features. First, it focuses on what the intern receives in exchange for his work.… Second, it also accords courts the flexibility to examine the economic reality as it exists between the intern and the employer.…
In the context of unpaid internships we think a non‐exhaustive set of considerations should include:
1. The extent to which the intern and the employer clearly understand that there is no expectation of compensation. Any promise of compensation, express or implied, suggests that the intern is an employee—and vice versa.
2. The extent to which the internship provides training that would be similar to that which would be given in an educational environment, including the clinical and other hands‐on training provided by educational institutions.
3. The extent to which the internship is tied to the intern’s formal education program by integrated coursework or the receipt of academic credit.
4. The extent to which the internship accommodates the intern’s academic commitments by corresponding to the academic calendar.
5. The extent to which the internship’s duration is limited to the period in which the internship provides the intern with beneficial learning.
6. The extent to which the intern’s work complements, rather than displaces, the work of paid employees while providing significant educational benefits to the intern.
7. The extent to which the intern and the employer understand that the internship is conducted without entitlement to a paid job at the conclusion of the internship.…
On Monday night, details of the revised white-collar overtime regulations were released. But we’ll know more once the actual details get posted on the Department of Labor website on Tuesday. (Bloomberg was the first to report it Monday evening.)
(Update 6/30/15: The proposed regulations are now available online from the
Walter Olson, who has been blogging at Overlawyered longer than just about anyone, has a very notable story about the Obama administration’s efforts to expand wage & hour law and intensify its enforcement.
In so doing, the U.S. Department of Labor has invoked a little known provision under the Fair Labor Standards Act called a
The U.S. Department of Labor has released their annual statistics on labor union membership. Nationwide, union membership is down slightly by .2 percent. In total, about 11 percent of the workforce belongs to a union. Compared to 2008, when I reported on these statistics, the number is down by a full percentage point.
The