“For over 80 years, a cornerstone of workers’ rights in this country is the right to a 40-hour workweek, the promise that you get to go home after 40 hours or you get higher pay for each extra hour that you spend laboring away from your loved ones,” said Acting DoL Secretary Julie Su in a statement. “I’ve heard from workers again and again about working long hours, for no extra pay, all while earning low salaries that don’t come anywhere close to compensating them for their sacrifices.”
The DoL said the announcement follows months of extensive outreach to employers, workers, unions, and other stakeholders. The department says it held 27 listening sessions with more than 2,000 participants to inform the proposed rule.
“We are committed to ensuring that all workers are paid fairly for their hard work,” said Jessica Looman, DoL’s principal deputy wage and hour division administrator. “For too long, many low-paid salaried workers have been denied overtime pay, even though they often work long hours and perform much of the same work as their hourly counterparts. This proposed rule would ensure that more workers receive extra pay when they work long hours.”
The proposed rule would do the following:
- Extend overtime protections to lower-paid salaried workers. Many salaried employees work side-by-side with hourly employees, doing the same tasks and often working over 40 hours a week. The department’s proposed salary level would help ensure that more of these low-paid salaried workers receive overtime protections traditionally provided by the department’s rules.
- Provide incentives to better classify executive, administrative, or professional employees. By better identifying which employees are executive, administrative, or professional employees who should be overtime exempt, the proposed rule will better ensure that those who are not exempt will gain more time off or receive additional compensation when working more than 40 hours a week.
- Prevent a future erosion of overtime protections and ensure greater predictability. The rule proposes automatically updating the salary threshold every three years to reflect current earnings data.
- Restore overtime protections for U.S. territories. From 2004 until 2019, the department’s regulations ensured that for U.S. territories where the federal minimum wage was applicable, so too was the overtime salary threshold. The department’s proposed rule would return to that practice and ensure that workers in the U.S. territories subject to the federal minimum wage have the same overtime protections as other U.S. workers.
Upon publication in the Federal Register, the notice of proposed rulemaking will be open for public comment for 60 days. 