Society of American Florists volunteer leaders are reacting this week to news that the implementation of new overtime regulations has been suspended indefinitely.
The regulations, set to go into effect Dec. 1, would have raised the salary limit below which workers automatically qualified for overtime pay to $47,476 from $23,660. A federal judge in Texas ruled last week that the Obama administration had “exceeded its authority by raising the overtime salary limit so significantly.”
Mayesh Wholesale Florist, headquartered in Los Angeles, was “finalizing plans and communications to employees on the day that the judge put a hold on the decision,” said Ben Powell, the company’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer.
Since the injunction, “we have not executed anything and we plan to hold tight until further notice,” Powell added. “It is our assumption that the Obama rule will not be implemented under the Trump Administration.”
According to Nancy Hammer, senior public policy counsel at the Society for Human Resource Management, that’s a sound conclusion.
“What this injunction means is that the Dec. 1 deadline is no more,” she told E-Brief editors last week, as the news broke. “Everyone can take a breather.”
Businesses owners and advocacy groups cheered the news of the injunction — even if the ruling, issued less than two weeks before the scheduled Dec. 1 implementation of the new regulations, created a kind of whiplash in an already confusing environment: Many owners and employers had been struggling to understand the new rules and draw up plans for their workforces, according to Hammer.
While the injunction is temporary, and the Labor Department can appeal the decision, Hammer said any further changes “will take a while”— far beyond the Dec. 1 deadline — and with an incoming administration that has expressed opposition to the rule, “it’s unclear whether this will go forward in any form.”
Hammer suggested last week that business owners who have already made adjustments to comply with the new regulations would need to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to move forward or revert back to their previous workforce plans.
That’s the case at Kennicott Brothers Company in Chicago, which had already completed “90 percent” of its changes when the company heard about the delay, according to Gustavo Gilchrist, the company’s president and a member of SAF’s board of directors.
“Wanting to treat all our employees fairly, we went ahead with the pending changes despite the last minute ruling,” he explained.
