Monday morning musings for office watchers.
Subsequent-Up Rules|College students Placing, UAW Election
Rebecca Rainey: The Biden DOL is wrapping up 2022 with fairly a couple of gadgets left on its regulatory agenda, together with main guidelines which can be expected to face scrutiny within the newly Republican-controlled Home.
Right here’s a rundown:
Time beyond regulation: We’re nonetheless ready on the Wage and Hour Division to launch a proposal to replace its additional time laws. The rulemaking was due final month, according to the regulatory agenda. Throughout the summer the company held stakeholder conferences searching for enter on the rule change, which is predicted to broaden time-and-a-half protections to extra employees.
Below the Truthful Labor Requirements Act, employees are exempt from OT pay if they’re salaried, earn greater than a certain quantity per yr, and work in a “bona fide government, administrative, or skilled capability.”
The wage threshold beneath which employees are robotically owed additional time pay is $35,568, a determine set by the Trump administration in 2019.
Democrats and labor teams say the division has the authority to elevate the OT wage threshold to $82,732 by 2026, however it’s unclear if the Biden administration will go that far. Enterprise teams have urged the Biden DOL to abandon the update all together, arguing that firms couldn’t shoulder the brand new payroll prices with rising inflation.
In the course of the Obama administration, the WHD issued a rule to boost the wage threshold to $47,476, and replace it each three years based mostly on modifications in common revenue. However
Prevailing wages: A closing rule that will tweak how the company calculates prevailing wages paid to employees on federally funded building initiatives beneath the Davis-Bacon Act is due in December, according to the regulatory agenda. The 1931 regulation requires employees to obtain pay and advantages equal to native charges for related jobs when engaged on initiatives funded by the federal authorities.
The DOL’s modifications are being carefully watched forward of the wave of infrastructure initiatives anticipated to be topic to these guidelines. Firms seeking to faucet into sure tax credit beneath the Inflation Discount Act must pay prevailing wages, among other requirements.
The proposal would set the prevailing wage on the fee paid to not less than 30% of employees doing a specific job in a geographic space. DOL presently calculates the “prevailing wage” by way of a survey course of, and designates a fee as “prevailing” if greater than 50% of employees in a sure space are paid at that quantity.
The Biden DOL mentioned it usually doesn’t obtain sufficient responses to its surveys, leaving the company to make use of a mean fee when setting wages for sure federal initiatives. The administration mentioned the decrease threshold will permit the company to set a “prevailing” fee in additional situations. However, trade teams have criticized the determinations, arguing they’re based mostly on inaccurate survey information and skewed in favor of union charges.
“Persuader” rule: The DOL can also be on account of launch a closing rule that will broaden reporting necessities for companies that use anti-union consultants.
The company sought public input on the proposal, which might require firms to incorporate whether or not they’ve been a contractor for the federal authorities on their LM-10 type, by way of October.
Some companies are required to file an annual LM-10 type, detailing the corporate’s expenditures on consultants employed to “persuade” workers relating to their organizing and collective bargaining rights or to observe the actions of workers and unions concerned in a labor dispute.
If the rule is finalized, companies additionally can be required to report if they’re a federal contractor or subcontractor, in addition to the company or businesses that contract with them for work.
Tutorial employees and supporters picket throughout a strike on the College of California Los Angeles campus in Los Angeles, on Nov. 21. About 48,000 educational employees throughout the distinguished College of California system have walked off the job, backed by the United Auto Staff.
Photographer: Jill Connelly/Bloomberg by way of Getty Photos
Ian Kullgren: The United Auto Staff has a giant week forward.
Whereas everybody’s consideration has been mounted on the renewed menace of a rail strike, the biggest work stoppage of 2022 has been taking part in out at College of California campuses throughout the state. Some 48,000 instructing assistants and researchers have now been on strike for 2 weeks beneath the auspices of the UAW, which in recent times has made a giant push into greater schooling.
That is no peculiar walkout—it’s the biggest greater ed strike ever recorded in our Bloomberg Regulation database of labor stoppages, which spans greater than three many years.
Whereas the UC strike doesn’t have an effect on the provision chain in the identical manner a rail strike would, it’s a high-water mark within the motion for tutorial unions and displays how the wave of post-pandemic employee unrest isn’t nearly blue-collar jobs.
Additionally at play is a shifting legal landscape that has emboldened scholar employees. The Nationwide Labor Relations Board final yr scrapped a proposal that will have banned these college students from organizing. Unions at Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard have sprung up in recent times, prompting the UAW and different non-education unions to get in on the motion.
However public universities, that are usually bigger than personal colleges, are ruled by state collective bargaining legal guidelines—an element that appears to be working within the UC college students’ favor to date. The California Public Worker Relations Board mentioned final week it issued seven unfair labor apply complaints towards the college administration for withholding details about wages and stipends, and for neglecting its obligation to discount.
Learn extra: University of California Workers Strike, Demanding Wage Hikes
On high of the UC strike, the UAW is wrapping up its first election to choose the subsequent union president. Whoever wins when the votes are tallied this week will inherit the powerful job of cleansing up the scandal-plagued union and getting ready for contract negotiations with the Detroit automakers subsequent yr. The depend begins Tuesday, however we could not know the outcomes till later within the week.
The election will probably be overseen by a federal watchdog appointed beneath a settlement in 2020 with the US Division of Justice. It is going to be a tightly run operation, with representatives from the monitor’s workplace and candidate-picked election observers watching each step of the method on the facility close to Dayton, Ohio.
Incumbent UAW President Ray Curry is the odds-on favourite, however we’ll nonetheless be watching the vote totals for Curry’s main opponent, Shawn Fain, in addition to the down-ballot races. Even when Fain doesn’t win this time, a robust displaying would recommend deeper discontent amongst UAW members than beforehand recognized—and a brewing reform motion that would shake up negotiations with the Detroit automakers subsequent yr.
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