New overtime rules for federal workers remain unclear
Federal employees will not be immediately affected by the Labor Department's plan to revise overtime pay regulations, an official at the Office of Personnel Management said Wednesday.
OPM and union officials said, however, that the ultimate impact of the overhaul is still unclear.
Labor Department Secretary Elaine Chao announced changes to the long-standing Fair Labor Standards Act Tuesday and said that the new regulations are needed to clarify and strengthen rules on overtime compensation. In 1974, Congress applied the FLSA to the federal government and gave OPM responsibility for regulating overtime rules for executive branch agencies. The Labor Department has traditionally determined the criteria for which employees are eligible for overtime pay, and OPM generally follows that lead.
"When workers know their rights and employers know how to pay workers, everybody wins," Chao said. "We are restoring overtime to what it was intended to be: fair pay for workers, instead of a lawsuit lottery. And we will use these new, clear standards to vigorously enforce the overtime laws on behalf of workers."
Despite her intentions, those standards were released in an extremely dense volume that OPM and union officials are still sorting through.
"We don't know what impact the new overtime regulations will have on federal workers. That remains to be seen as more information unfolds," said John Gage, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. "What we do know is that the regulations will have a negative impact on the middle class."
AFGE officials also are upset that the new rules did not include references to the previous overtime regulations. The union complained that without a reference to the old rules, "determining classes of workers whose status have been affected requires complex analysis. Without comparative analysis, AFGE representatives are reluctant to trust statistics touted by the administration."
Colleen Kelley, the president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said that she had concerns about the overtime regulations when the draft version was released last year. NTEU officials are reading through the new overtime rules.
"Given how problematic the proposed regs were," Kelly said, "we want to take a very close look at the final regs."
An OPM official, who asked not to be identified, said that "it's too early at the moment" to know which federal workers will be affected by the ruling. The official said that any federal worker who is deemed ineligible for overtime by the revised Labor regulations would then be covered by Title 5of the U.S. Code, which governs federal civilian personnel management.
There will be "no immediate impact to the federal workforce" while OPM officials adjust their own regulations "to conform with those put out by DoL," the official said