SHERMAN, Texas—Once again, a Trump-named federal judge in rural Texas has ruled for the corporate class, this time by rolling back the Biden administration’s expansion of overtime pay eligibility for an estimated four million workers.
In his Nov. 15 decision in the federal courthouse in Sherman, U.S. District Judge Paul Jordan said the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, which handles overtime pay rules, “exceeded its authority” when it decided to raise the pay ceiling DOL uses to determine which workers are eligible for overtime and which ones—“executive, administrative and professional” workers—aren’t.
Practically, the judge said, DOL makes pay the only standard. The law, he ruled, says otherwise.
“It’s their duties and not their dollars that really matter,” in determining who gets overtime pay.
Judge Jordan’s ruling, and the case itself, follows a common pattern of the corporate class and its political puppets: Gather themselves in an anti-worker coalition, enlist the Chamber of Commerce and the state government—or governments—on your side, find a Donald Trump-named judge in a rural Texas federal court and get the judge to toss out a pro-worker rule nationwide.
In this case, the Plano Chamber of Commerce led the corporate coalition against the overtime pay rule, and Texas’s deep-red GOP government, claiming it would lose millions of dollars in overtime pay, joined in.
DOL admitted, Judge Jordan said, that state and local governments nationwide would have to spend about $200 million to obey the new Biden rule in its first year, split evenly between workers’ paychecks and adjusting their payroll systems to comply with the new limits.
Lobbies for hotels, the Associated Builders and Contractors—a notorious anti-worker construction group—the International Franchise Association, convenience stores, home builders, wholesalers and distributors, and the Texas Restaurant Association piled on. So did two local companies.
Two prominent cogs of the corporate right-wing joined: the National Federation of Independent Business, Inc., and the National Retail Federation, widely known as a Walmart front group.
Judge Jordan was particularly scathing about the hike in the pay ceiling, saying it virtually defies the New Deal-era Fair Labor Standards Act, which enacted the minimum wage and overtime pay. In plain English, the judge said the Biden rule makes pay virtually the only standard for determining when a worker gets overtime, not the duties test the law lays out.
“What matters is the functions or duties of the employee. Each definition describes tasks or conduct—e.g., ‘carrying into effect,’ ‘management,’ ‘conforming to the technical… standards,’” he wrote. The “functions and duties focus on the nature of a person’s ‘performance,’ ‘learning,’ and ‘skills,’ among other, similar attributes.
“Absent from these definitions is any mention of salary…Congress elected to exempt employees based on the capacity in which they are employed. It’s their duties and not their dollars that really matter.”
The catch to Judge Jordan’s reasoning is that under that duties test, particularly under Republican regimes, workers as low on the pay scale as newspaper editorial assistants and delivery drivers were ruled as “executive, administrative, and professional” and couldn’t get overtime pay, no matter how many hours they spent on the job, or how low their regular pay is.
The Economic Policy Institute calculates the workers who would benefit from the overtime pay threshold hike include—but are not limited to—hotel and restaurant workers, construction workers, and agriculture workers. Just over half are women, one in eight are Black, two of every seven are ages 25-34, a third are millennials, and a fourth graduated from high school but went no further.
None of this data was in Judge Jordan’s decision.
Under Biden’s overtime pay rule, those low-level workers—some four million people—would become immediately eligible for overtime pay. The judge issued an injunction rolling back the pay rule nationwide, but he left open the question of whether employers could demand that newly eligible workers repay the extra overtime money they earned starting this past July 1.
Overtime pay is time-and-a-half pay for any hours an employee works above the standard 40-hour workweek. But workers earning more than a certain amount per year earn too much to get it, the rule says. The Biden DOL’s rule, announced this year, raised that “certain amount” to $43,888 starting this past July 1, $58,656 yearly beginning on Jan. 1, and then automatically indexes further hikes every three years, tying them to inflation.
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