LITTLE ROCK – Attorney General Tim Griffin today issued the following statement after filing an amicus brief on behalf of himself and 13 other state attorneys general in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas supporting Texas’s motion for summary judgment in its suit against the U.S. Department of Labor and its rule regulating overtime pay for exempt employees:
“The rule is another example of the Biden-Harris administration trying to rewrite laws passed by Congress. The new rule drives up costs for private businesses and forces state governments to increase budgets—hitting Americans’ pocketbooks twice.
“Texas has already secured a preliminary injunction stopping this rule, and I am proud to lead this coalition of states in supporting our neighbor asking to vacate this latest effort by the Biden-Harris administration to go around Congress in an election-year giveaway.”
Federal law exempts workers with “executive, administrative, and professional” duties from receiving overtime pay. For decades, the Labor Department has used salary as one factor in deciding when that applies. The new rule requires employers to provide overtime pay to salaried professional, administrative, and executive employees who are already highly paid and were previously exempt from overtime requirements by conditioning overtime exemptions primarily on workers’ pay rather than their duties.
Griffin is joined in the amicus brief by the attorneys general of Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
To read the brief, click here.
For a printer-friendly version of this release, click here.
