Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy | Hacker News Reader

Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy

thehill.com

80 pointsprotomyth93 comments

I don't know how businesses get away without paying overtime. My life is finite. My work hours are finite. If you want more hours out of me, you pay for them.

Businesses pay for the overtime, but not at 150% of the base rate.

This is more about which salaried employees are exempt, that is they don't get overtime. The theory is if you are pulling an oar then, you get overtime if you are hourly or yearly paid. If you are in charge of the ship then you don't have to get overtime.

The problem was the law set a fixed annual income as the test for exemption and this got eroded away by inflation. The Obama rule was an attempt to restore the original intent of the law.

People covered by these exemptions are often not paid overtime at all, as the Fair Labor Standards Act does not require any overtime pay if you fall under the exemptions.

These exemptions are meant to cover people in certain job roles where output is measured by work delivered, not hours spent, and where the person has independent responsibility for controlling their working hours to certain extent and were overtime as such is in theory voluntary.

The threshold in question exists to make it harder to "define away" overtime pay obligations by pretending a role is more independent than it is, by connecting it to pay levels that makes it more likely that the role does in fact meet the intent of the law. The old/current levels makes a total mockery of that

It's worth noting that this change also follows a change in 2004 that went the other way - redefining large groups of previously non-exempt lower level supervisors etc. as exempt, drastically cutting their rights to overtime pay.

>>>>These exemptions are meant to cover people in certain job roles where output is measured by work delivered, not hours spent, and where the person has independent responsibility for controlling their working hours to certain extent and were overtime as such is in theory voluntary.

While that is the stated reason, if you actually read the law it becomes clear that these exemptions are meant to cover people in certain job roles where the lobbyist paid congress the correct amount of money to get their preferred job roles exempted

>>>>It's worth noting that this change also follows a change in 2004 that went the other way

Yes and many (myself included) are wondering why the 2004 Rules in favor of business are with in the scope of DOL power, but the 2016 rules are not.

Legally speaking if the 2016 rules are not valid than neither are the 2004 rules

I don't know. I kind of like being exempt. If I get my work done early and I decide the take the afternoon off, my paycheck is the same.

That said I'm lucky and my company freely comps additional paid time off when I start working more than 40 hours per week.

A minor point, but this rule was to help others who don't have your kind of work to have some protections.

People talk about "getting their work done" as if an equal amount of work were doled out every day to each worker and getting it done were a "you eat what you kill" result of being highly productive. Is this work-assignment principle common? I could see why a manager might distribute work this way, but I've never seen it actually happen -- it has always been "oh great, you finished early today, you'll have twice as much work tomorrow."

The optimistic explanation is that I haven't found a good manager + workplace yet and I should keep looking. The pessimistic explanation is that "getting your work done" is a sign of success at the game of politics on one hand and masterful framing on the other, rather than a result of skillful software engineering.

I'm right out of school, I've only had one job, so I don't have a very good sample to make up my own mind from. I'd appreciate hearing opinions on the matter.

I have a mostly infinite to-do list, so my work is never done.

When I'm on a more well-defined project, I'll have a deadline and a set of things to do based on how fast I work and what we (me, the project manager, maybe the other developers on the project) think is reasonable.

Several co-workers usually have a single project where work is lumpy. They can have a several-day to-do list one week, and be twiddling their thumbs waiting on other people the next week.

I don't know anyone who gets a daily task list that isn't calibrated to their skill level.

In my experience the explanations you provide apply more to general flexibility of working hours. Reasonable employers shouldn't have an issue with you stepping away from work at anytime as long as your performance is at least adequate. Playing politics might offer a similar result, but I think it'd be easier to lose this privilege if you don't actually have the skills to back it up and are found out.

Leaving early for the day is more likely to happen if you complete a big deliverable early than anticipated. Like you reserve a full day for launching a major version, it goes smoothly, so your afternoon is unexpectedly free. The gamble is sometimes you might end up occupied until late into the night, so it tends to balance out.

Poor phrasing on my part. It's more about long term performance. My manager knows I'll get my work done so she doesn't really care how it gets done.

You are correct that there is always more work to do, but if I find myself reasonably caught up by noon and everything else can wait until tomorrow, I often just call it a day. My manager doesn't care.

I've always read "getting my work done" as similar to "pulling my own weight" or "doing my fair share." They're not supposed to be read literally, only to convey an overall sentiment.

When I managed my team, work was never assigned to an individual. It was assigned to the team and the team took responsibility for it. Individuals accepted responsibility for pieces of work as they completed prior work. If an individual wasn't contributing enough, either the team's productivity would suffer or other members of the team would step up to fill in the gap. If that that lack of contribution became consistent, I'd notice, either through poor team performance or conversations with disgruntled team members who were covering.

A lot of it was handled by feel and when a member of my team felt like he was accomplishing enough to keep the team performing well, s/he absolutely had the discretion to leave early. The key is that when the team is responsible, people are motivated very differently from when an individual is responsible. Your team members are often your friends whereas you might have a more combative relationship with your manager. No one wants to be the one that lets the team down. And, similarly, if a team is being pushed too hard, everyone will feel it and everyone can push back together. This makes it really easy to see, as a manager, when you're asking too much of people.

I'd say if you're looking for a healthy work environment, look for ones that emphasize team accountability over individual accountability and then try to find a team where everyone respects each other. That team is, more often than not, going to do well and you'll share in that success. If you have a slump, someone will cover for you. If someone else does and you feel up to it, you can go above and beyond for a bit. It's a lot easier to give that extra effort when you're doing well than it is when you're struggling.

Then if the team works hard (say, they're superhuman and can work 24 hours a day 7 days a week straight) and do what other teams do in 3 months in one, will they get the other two off?

If not, you're just pushing responsibility up.

Not exactly, but a similar situation happened with my team.

There was a period where we simply accomplished a lot more than other teams. It wasn't superhuman effort, which isn't sustainable. Instead, it was better tool selection and streamlined processes (automation and continuous delivery, which shed a lot of the baggage that comes with large releases) that accounted for most of the increase in productivity. In fact, my team worked less hours and had fewer production issues than other teams.

The organization (eventually) reacted the way that healthy organizations should...they promoted most of the team into leadership roles in other teams that weren't performing as well. The reward for our success was more money and responsibility and the entire organization benefited from what we'd learned.

I say eventually, because I had to fight a pretty big PR battle before management above me saw the virtue of the way that my team operated. Before that, there was a tendency to give star performer awards and kudos to people putting in long hours to make release deadlines or putting in heroic efforts to keep error-prone production environments up an running. Management saw my team leaving at a normal time every day and didn't think that was worth rewarding. It took a mountain of data for me to show that a boring, predictable production environment that allowed us to push out more features was better serving customers.

How does someone in hospitality or retail "get their work done and go home early"? How do you staff a cash register so assiduously that you get to knock off early?

I work at a digital agency, in many ways I am a cog in a ticket processing pipeline. We have an endless stream of tickets. If one gets done there is another waiting, there is no reason not to be working. It is a bit of a bummer, as a lifestyle. But makes total sense as a business. This isn't a school where the goal is learning and assignments are the method. The assignments are the goal and there is enough for months of work, I already know how to do them, so there is no reason not to.

I yearn for something a bit different, I don't feel like an endless stream of 100% work is healthy. But the only way for that to be different is for the business to actively say "yes, we would like to make less revenue so that you can do something that isn't what we pay you for"

The realistic scenario is that I work fewer hours and get paid less. Which is fine, and lines up nicely with the meritocracy rhetoric. But I can't help but feel like the work 40 hours, eat, sleep, die method of employment is a slight perversion of life.

In most companies I have seen it's a one way street. You have to work longer if you don't get your work done. And if you finish early you get more work.

But that indicates that you are exempt because you are in a type of role where you truly do have genuine control of your own working hours.

The rule in question protects those people where their control is often purely fictional by setting a lower bar.

Imagine a situation where you are 50% support engineer (meaning your teammates' tasks depend on you, let's say sysadmin) and 50% worker (carpenter, developer, DBA, cleaner). Basically 20h/w are your slack hours for ad-hoc tasks.

You get a worker task, say add a button to your application, estimate it at 12h and schedule to start on Wednesday. Ok, Monday is release date. Then it turns out that the worker task actually takes more than 12h. And at the same time on Wednesday some computer/server breaks, which takes 12h to fix, so there are no slack hours this week. Basically you are left with extra X hours this week. Is this overtime? If you took afternoon off on Tuesday?

Another situation. You get a 2 hour maintenance window at 19:00 on Friday. If you get to leave 2 hours early, technically there is no overtime. But in practice your workday is 08:00-21:00 - 13 hours long on Friday.

This is the [moral] issue with yearly/monthly salary. Basically employee agrees to agree on task length estimates and then do those tasks, not much different from consultant agreeing on hourly rate and task list with estimates. And this is somewhat of a problem, because power dynamics usually favour employer and employee can be coerced to work unpaid overtime. It is easy to hourly bill production line workers, but it is much different with intellectual tasks where output is not fixed. Is watching the birds while you contemplate on the problem work or not? Maybe you start thinking about your pet parrot. A huge can of worms here. I would say that higher salaries (despite supply/demand, education, etc.) in intellectual fields are the effect of expected occasional overtime not vice versa.

If your employer takes your actual output as "best you can do" and in some way compensates for everything exceeding 40 weekly/8 daily hours I hope for them to succeed and expand so there are more places like that :)

I can understand it for higher earners. You are well compensated, typically better conditions and have employment options should the enviroment become toxic.

For lower pays absolutely. If an employers agrees to X contracted hours/rate and then demands X+ hours because they know you cant say no, this is essentially theft. And to not pass this as rule essentially mandates it as OK. I hope this gets sorted. I suspect this judge and any future politicians/judges involved will come under a heap of scrutiny/pressure over this. It is simply too clearly unjust not to pass it. It would follow a person for the rest of their career and they would know it.

Your first sentence is the justification for paying people less than 40k year and expecting 80 hours of work out of them. It doesn't hold up.

> I can understand it for higher earners

What's the cutoff that determines when someone is classified as a higher earner?

4. The employee’s hourly rate of pay, or annual salary if paid on salaried basis, meets a minimum threshold amount set by California’s Division of Labor Statistics and Research (DLSR). For 2015, the DLSR set the amounts at $41.27 per hour or annual salary of not less than $85,981.40 for full time employment, and paid not less than $7,165.12 per month.

There should be no cutoff. it's either paid for all (as it should be) or for none. How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?

>How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?

The same way we say that people must have less stuff, including health care, college for their kids, etc., because they earn less.

"How can you say that some people have less rights because they earn more?"

It's not that they have 'less rights' - it's that the expectations of the job are different. You're a CEO, you're going to have to 'work a ton of hours' for your massive paycheque, it just goes with the job. You don't want it - stay VP or Director, or manager.

CEO's, doctors etc. are not commodities.

For hourly unskilled workers, 'labour' etc - there always have to be protections. Without them - we head back to 19th century oppression.

I understand that's it's nuanced, and I agree that 'some salary' is a really, really crude way to define it ... but something needs to be there, or else you get 1/3 of Americans working 80 hours a week for de-facto $4/hour.

Make no mistake - the 'free market wage' for 1/3 of Americans who's skills are commoditized, but who nevertheless to 'valuable work' is basically 1% above 'survival'. Well below poverty. You could argue the 'free market' decides how much value they actually provide, but I would argue that the rate is entirely a function of relative power disparity between the two parties (employee v. big corp) and nothing more. It's why 'minimum wage' laws exist in most places. 'Free markets' work when actors have agency, and some power ... when actors don't have some degree of power-parity, 99% of the surpluses go into the hands of one side of the equation.

You got a good long answer, but more simply: An expected level of occasional 40+ hour weeks is often baked into to the salary at a higher level. When I switched to a salaried manager position, my new rate of pay was better than my old hourly, including the overtime I used to work. Now I know the check that will come every two weeks is the same, if I can do my work in under 40 hours nobody cares. It is much better for me to focus on my job and not worry about the exact number of hours I work.

And having been exempt salaried but working in D.C. for a dozen years where so much is done by government accounting rules, it's a total pain in the posterior to make sure your Official worked hours add up to exactly 40. One of the few nice things about working for Lucent in its dreadful calendar year 2001 was that I could just focus on getting the job done

The only time I ever liked doing that was when it was a tool to keep a company owner from cheating the salesmen by charging them too much for the labor we put into building the systems we'd together, almost always, sold to someone (and that company eventually died, you can't keep cheating all your salaried employees and expect to survive, we all walked away with 4-5 figures of bonuses or commissions formally owed to us).

I think another consideration is higher earning jobs typically have more of a gray area around what constitutes work. E.g. It's clear that a cashier isn't working anymore when they clock out. But as a developer, I certainly have times when I come up with an idea at home and start working on it, an idea in the shower, etc.

Higher earners are smart enough to figure out that rules that penalize employers for overtime - effectively hurt workers. So higher earners protect their rights to have job and overtime by blocking that overtime rule at their level.

Lower earners (collectively) are not able to figure out the unintended consequences and happily support that populist rule.

It's a federal judge. There isn't much career progression beyond that because they're appointed for life.

So, no, it won't follow them. This is also why we have lifetime appointments so judge's make legally correct rulings rather than politically appealing ones.

> There isn't much career progression beyond that because they're appointed for life.

Progression: Supreme court judge. Chief justice. Maybe not many steps but huge ones. Also it would follow them as for both their remaining tenure and legacy, something they would be distinctly aware of and care about.

> This is also why we have lifetime appointments so judge's make legally correct rulings rather than politically appealing one

That's the theory but there is a reason each side wants to be in power during a supreme court position change. It is because political views shift their interpretation of the law.

It is not the role of the judiciary to define what is just of unjust: they just need to make a ruling based on the law. There is really no difference if someone is paid $20k or $90k: you always must discount that rate if you are not an hourly employee. It is not theft: it is at-will employment and nobody is being forced to take it.

Also, the ruling is only being postponed:

--- “Due to the approaching effective date of the Final Rule, the Court’s ability to render a meaningful decision on the merits is in jeopardy,” he wrote. “A preliminary injunction preserves the status quo while the Court determines the department’s authority to make the Final Rule as well as the Final Rule’s validity. ---

If the law was clear, then there would be no difference between whether the decision is done during the current or future administration. It seems that there is enough ambiguity that the course of action varies depending on who is in power, which appears to indicate to me that the overtime rule by Obama's administrations was on weak grounds regardless.

"it is at-will employment and nobody is being forced to take it."

Or you're free to starve, right?

Yes you are free to starve if you choose so and keeping everyone fed is not the prerogative of a small business. That reality may sound harsh and unfair to you but it doesn't make it untrue.

Either way my experience with crappy jobs suggest that it's hard to work more hours because of overtime pay rules. You have to simply work two jobs, which is what many people at places like McDonalds do to make ends meet. All of these rules have unintended side effects.

> Yes you are free to starve if you choose so and keeping everyone fed is not the prerogative of a small business.

"Keeping everyone fed" is an... interesting transmutation of the point you're responding to, which is more or less about whether businesses have any ethical obligations towards whatever employees they have (not "everyone") regardless of what market conditions will bear, and certainly stops well short of the idea that small businesses must generally solve hunger.

If the job market is poor enough for a given employee that they don't have any other prospects, should that give an employer license to demand more of their time at the same pay rate? Or perhaps any smaller pay rate? Demand they do things which are health hazards? Coerce into doing illegal things? Demand sexual favors?

> Either way my experience with crappy jobs suggest that it's hard to work more hours because of overtime pay rules. You have to simply work two jobs, which is what many people at places like McDonalds do to make ends meet.

I don't think labor operations of a McDonald's have much to do with overtime, since the situation you're describing generally means the workers in question have trouble getting to full time. But yes, it probably does have something to do with employers trying to avoid bearing the cost of full-time employees, along with trying to optimize labor supply to indicated demand by buying smaller slices of worker time and pushing the cost of coordinating that worker's time on to the worker.

> All of these rules have unintended side effects.

Sure, and debating which ones are worthwhile and effective which ones aren't is great. As it turns out, not having many of these rules also has unintended side effects, which we've had a chance to see in action in the past.

>It is not theft: it is at-will employment and nobody is being forced to take it.

That's a strange view of how the world works. But of course if one has never been forced to take a shitty job because they just have no options, one can hold such a view more easily.

I don't think it's very charitable to imply that the parent only holds their opinion due to their assumed economic status.

I've had plenty of shitty jobs in my day, it was always a choice for me to take them and I was always glad to have them. I used to pull twelve hour shifts on a production line. Did that job for three weeks to save up to move across the country.

You always have options. You can always make a plan. If the plan fails, you learn from it and make a better one. But I tell you what, I'd rather have a shit job as an option rather than no job as an option.

>But I tell you what, I'd rather have a shit job as an option rather than no job as an option.

That's always the case with any kind of blackmail.

It only works when you are not an easily replaceable commodity. Unless your extra more expensive hours are something your employer can't readily find on the market, it'd trivial to acquire more hours from someone else for a cheaper rate.

I don't think your stance is unreasonable. Far from it. However, as a worker, I prefer to get paid a lump sum per month as long as I am free to manage my time. I work extra when I want to work extra (which usually coincides with my employer needing some extra help). When I need time off, I take it.

Normally I work more than I get paid for. Sometimes disaster strikes, or illness, or once in a lifetime opportunities. I want my employer to respect what I do and give me the opportunity to take the time that I need.

I freely give them my time. They freely give me my space.

I've worked in places where they track every second. You have a certain number of sick days and god help you if you need more. Punch in. Punch out. Emergencies happen and I'm off to my manager to sign off my overtime slip before I'll even think about stemming the flow of money resulting from downtime. I could go on for a long time, but you get the point.

I don't like working for places that act that way. And while I understand the necessity to protect those that must work in such terrible conditions, I don't want to give up the way I like to live: where we both freely give each other what we need.

One quick final comment. I don't leave this to chance. I tell my employers pretty clearly that this is how I like to live. If they can't accommodate me, it's usually a sign for me to start looking elsewhere to work. Not everybody has that luxury, but I think it is the ideal they should strive for rather than what people usually ask for (overtime pay).

You can't optimize for the best interpretation and faithful adherence to the law. Just because some drivers could actually drive safely at night with their lights off doesn't make that an ok thing for everybody to do.

In my country / province (Canada / Alberta), IT workers are considered professionals and as such we are overtime exempt while we in no way qualify as "high earners" compared to a lot of the surrounding vocations - is that the same where you are, or are we just getting a raw deal up here?

I'm a contractor, and prefer to remain so, after a brief stint as a permanent, ten years back, with an employer that just expected its staff to pull all-nighters and weekends with no notice, no overtime pay and no time in lieu.

I prefer to work hourly rates, so that the moment I am asked to work overtime, I can just start charging for it. Unfortunately it's been a long time since I saw a contract here in Australia on anything other than a daily rate - so now, if I ever have to work overtime in a day, then I just make that up by working fewer hours the next. And then if asked to work weekends, then I charge per day for that, too.

I've never accepted the argument that because "professionals" get paid more that we're handing a blank cheque to employers to make us work as long as they like without extra pay. Doing so just reduces our effective hourly rate, in the long term.

TBH, I don't actually know how the law in Australia works regarding this, but it seems that employers can get away with not paying for overtime, if they want.

Interesting unintended consequences with this - my sister-in-law had her job hours radically shifted to deal with this rule - and not in a good way that she appreciated.

Right. Most businesses (non-restaurant) are going to easily be able to get around this rule and make things worse for employees. It will exacerbate the "contract employee" revolution in office settings.

Would you mind explaining the shift change in more detail? Did the employer hire more in order to lower everyone's hours below the overtime limit?

Not the parent, but I have known a couple of places that simply cut hours, without either hiring more people or increasing the hourly burden on exempt employees, and then complained they weren't meeting their targets.

(I've also known one or two places where they flat out told people to not report hours above a threshold and/or "mysteriously" deleted the overtime from the hours recorded, and the employees felt they couldn't report it to external authorities without getting fired.)

On election day Santa Clara county approved Measure E, which requires any business above a certain number of employees to offer additional work hours to existing part-time employees before hiring more part-time employees. The idea being to make it illegal for a company to just keep hiring more and more part-timers to avoid ever giving someone enough hours to become full-time.

I suspect if the overtime rule sticks around we'll see similar measures pop up for it.

Sweet more laws. Maybe when we finally get enough laws we'll become a just and kind society.

This is shit. The lower limit for salary hasn't changed for years, and has not tracked inflation. As a post-doc this would have probably really bummed me out if it wasn't for the fact my union had already signed a new contract with the university for new pay raises based on the new Obama administration rules. Yay union.

You're effectively saying "[The rule of law] is shit", which as the article notes, might also result in the new Trump administration refusing to defend this administrative action (which would be legitimate unlike the cases where the executive of a government refuses to defend a law passed by the legislature in front of the court system (just to lay out our general pattern of 3-4 branches of government (4 when you count the "administrative state"))).

Or more simply, the ends do not justify the means, even if, as you point out and I agree in principle, the ends in this case are potentially good.

The prospect of Trump in power in what's arguably no longer a republic run under the Rule of Law has gotten a lot of people to reconsider their position on this (and I share a concern, despite or perhaps even more because I voted for him), and I'll close with the classic Man of All Seasons quote:

Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

No, that would be a strawman argument. Whatever legal principles are at stake here do not rise to a repudiation of law itself.

Well, I perceive that SubiculumCode is among other things arguing that this legal procedural issue, and the possibility that the administrative rule making did not follow the law, something we ought to accept as legit given that Obama nominated the judge and the hurdle to get a preliminary injunction is very high, as Sacho abily discusses in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13028904, "is shit".

I certainly could have gotten his intent wrong, but for now his words have to stand as written, and the issue of the Rule of Law is both entirely relevant to this case and to current events in the US.

Even if they were suggesting that the legal process in question was flawed, that would also not be equivalent to repudiating the rule of law. You may have an axe to grind on that topic, and I am sure that it's a wonderful rejoinder to a wide variety of political dissent. It is a strawman argument however you slice it. If questioning legal processes amounted to an attack on law, then all lawyers would be anarchists, and Congress would be...a pathology, perhaps. So far, there are few issues before the American public in which anyone is claimed or claiming to be above the rule of law, and it has precisely nothing to do with this case.

The more charitable interpretation of SubiculumCode's words, and the one that does not need to assume facts not in evidence, would be that "This is shit" should be taken to mean, "This is terrible news". Which would either way be a normal human reaction, and a valid opinion, despite your attempts to portray otherwise.

Indeed it is terrible news: Poverty is rough.

To be precise, the law and regulations were appropriate decades ago, when it protected workers, but in its current form, oppressed them into long underpaid, non-livable, labor. In my view, the Obama administration change in regulation, now blocked, was restoring the original effects and outcomes of those laws and regulations, and probably as originally intended by those whom passed it.

I certainly was not arguing that. I mean that the judge fucked Christmas up for a bunch of poor folk by blocking a well deserved change in regulation that no longer served its original intent in protecting laborers.

I mean that the judge fucked Christmas up for a bunch of poor folk by blocking a well deserved change in regulation that no longer served its original intent in protecting laborers.

All I can say is that I'm now quite certain I wasn't misreading the narrow part of the intent of your words that I initially commented on.

All I heard was strawman and no actual arguments. Even I can do that.

"You're effectively saying "[The rule of law] is shit", ..."

That is too much of a reach. There's a considerable distance between criticism of a law (or the lack of one) and of the rule of law.

The judge was not ruling on the substance of the overtime rule change, only whether the executive branch had the authority to make the rule change.

The judge determined that the overtime rule, which was created by the legislative branch, did not give the executive branch the authority to change the rule in the way the Labor dept. tried to.

The overtime law gives the Department of Labor the authority to define who is exempt. The judge was the one that made up law by inventing a limit to the authority that congress granted to the Department of Labor.

Here is a source for the judge's order: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/files/epress/Overtime_-...

I am not a lawyer, so I urge people to read the text and decide for themselves. Here's my analysis:

In order to issue a preliminary injuction, the plaintiffs must present a "prima facie" case, essentially, a demonstration that they can win the case under the assumption that all their factual claims are true. First the plaintiffs must demonstrate that they are likely to succeed on the merits of the case. Then they must show they would suffer "irreparable harm", necessitating the injunction. The court must then consider a "balance of hardships" - since in a preliminary injunction, both sides can claim "injury", the court must "consider the effect on each party of the granting or withholding of the requested relief". Further, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a "public interest" in the injunction.

For the "likelihood of success on the merits", the judge analysed each of the arguments:

1. Plaintiffs argue that the FLSA does not apply to the States; the judge decides it does, applying the "Garcia" analysis from the Supreme Court.

2. Plaintiffs argue that Chevron deference does not apply for this case, judge agrees. Chevron deference is a legal standard roughly saying that in the case of an ambiguous law, the Court should defer to the interpretation of the government body authorized to apply the law(as they are presumed experts in the field), as long as the interpretation does not contradict the evident intentions of the law.

3. Plaintiffs argue that the automatic update mechanism of the Final Rule violates the APA. The judge does not analyse this, using his previous analysis of Chevron deference to conclude that the Final Rule is unlawful and that 3) does not need to be settled.

The rest of the analysis("irreparable harm" etc) from the judge is not as long so I don't feel it's worth summarizing in any way.

I don't find the judge "making up" any law in their analysis - can you please be more specific which part of his analysis you disagree with?

The meat of the ruling is on pages 12 & 13.

The FLSA says "any employee employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity . . . as such terms are defined and delimited from time to time by regulations” is exempt from overtime.

The judge says that the minimum salary rule cannot be used to determine if an employee is exempt, even though the existing rule already uses minimum salary as a criteria. The law itself leaves it completely up to the regulator to define the criteria. So the judge invented a new limit on the regulator's authority that does not exist in the law.

Obama's overtime rule intentionally extended the threshold to cover employees who were employed in a bona fide executive, administrative, or professional capacity. The article mentions that more than 4 million workers would benefit - this was his administration's estimate of the number of such employees that would become non-exempt, used to justify the rule change. The previous salary threshold, on the other hand, was set at a level low enough that any employee earning below it was obviously employed in a non-exempt role.

The timing of this is intriguing. Pretty much last minute change. I do a lot of accounting & payroll consulting work (not in the US), but I see on a lot of forums that consultants in the US are panicking because they have spent weeks getting their client systems ready for the change, and now they have to maybe undo all of that in short order.

What does it matter anyway? Trump is coming to town. That was one of the first things he was going to nuke anyway..

Republicans were hoping not to have to repeal the rule after it had already taken effect pissing off millions of workers.

People keep talking about how Trump's election was about winning the white working class. We'll see how interested he is in their right to fair wages.

Trump's not even in office and he's getting blamed already. This was a judge who made the ruling. Not Trump.

Plus the judge was nominated by Obama.

That wasn't blaming him - it was saying it will be interesting to see how he reacts to this. He's got time to whine about a theater, surely this will also get an angry tweet.

He's not getting blamed. The above commenter is simply pointing out that this will serve as a good test as to whether he will come out in favour of working class people or business.

He already had expressed interest in changing the new Obama ruling. FYI, that was mentioned in TFA

The article does mention that in August Trump promised to roll back the regulation.

I think this entire thread is diverging from the article, but the article does quote Trump:

   Trump has vowed to roll back Obama regulations that he 
   says are hurting the economy. He expressed support for
   changing the overtime rule during the presidential
   campaign.
   
   “Rolling back the overtime regulation is just one 
   example of the many regulations that need to be 
   addressed to do that,” Trump told Circa in August. “We 
   would love to see a delay or a carve-out of sorts for 
   our small business owners."

Quoting blocks of text this way makes it really hard to read due to side-scrolling, particularly on mobile.

Agreed. This is completely removed from the context of the article but I primarily consume HN on mobile and I detest it when quotes are done this way. I really wish something was added to the FAQ re this.

Sorry to discriminate, but I read on a desktop mostly and the block text makes it clear it is a quote. Sorry about that, but of course, the article has the full text; although I'm not sure how the hill respects mobile or not.

Alternatives common on HN are to use > or italics.

Clearly quoting the article adds value to the conversation since several of the posters above didn't even see the relevance of referring to trump.

I'd argue the display issue is more the fault of HN than the poster.

Gotta work with what you have. If the intent is to communicate effectively on HN now, there are better ways to do it.

I'm not saying quoting is bad. There are better ways to do it on HN, such as using prefix > or italics.

The election was about electing a white racist bygot. Everything else they say it was about is just deflection. He could have defrauded students, assaulted woman, have a wife pose in pseudo lesbian porn pictures, use his charity for personal expenses and he still would have gotten elected. Ho wait...

Edit: At least the white nationalist guys admit why they like trump so much.

"Working class" people (with incomes below $50k/year) voted for Clinton.

All of them?

The smart ones, at least.

Why bring Trump at all in the discussion when a federal judge has blocked Obama's initiative?

The implication is that Trump will rescind Obama's new rule.

The article mentioned that Trump wanted to get rid of this legislation.

Why is the President making law in the first place? If this law was made by Congress, it would be less susceptible to legal challenge now, or reversal by a future administration.

The law gives the regulator the authority to determine who is exempt from overtime. This is not "making law", it is excersizing authority granted under existing law.

But it's exercising a kind of blank check of power given by Congress. I don't think Congress should issue blank checks; I think they should do their job.

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