MAGA Judge Kills Overtime Pay For 4 Million Workers

A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump has blocked an overtime pay rule from the Biden Administration that would have guaranteed overtime pay for more than 4 million salaried workers across the country – and millions more would have been eligible next year. The rule has been stalled as employers were trying to prevent having to pay workers for their time, and now millions of people will be forced to work longer hours without any overtime. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this ruling.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Late last week, a Trump appointed judge, US district Judge Sean Jordan, sided with the state of Texas and a group of associated business industries to kill an overtime rule put in place earlier this year by President Biden's Department of Labor. This overtime rule would've extended overtime pay to 4 million salaried workers here in the United States. And this one MAGA judge, because of the lawsuit from Texas, and of course the business groups that don't wanna pay their workers living wages, it's dead. You cannot force these companies to pay overtime to these workers. Now you can still, by the way, force them to work overtime. You just don't have to pay 'em time and a half. Here's what the rule from the Biden Biden administration, again earlier this year did it actually raised the threshold for who among salaried workers gets overtime pay. Right now that threshold is a little over $35,000.

So if you make under $35,000 a year and you're salaried and you work overtime, the rule says you gotta pay time and a half. They raised the threshold to $43,888 a year. And by raising it by that $8,000 a year, 4 million more salaried workers would've gotten overtime, pay for the overtime that they're already working, and then next year it would jump up to $58,656 a year, which means millions and millions more workers would be eligible for overtime pay next year. Because this judge sided with these businesses to kill this rule, millions of people will now still be working overtime. They just won't be paid time and a half. And the argument is absolutely ludicrous here. Here's what they argued. Um, the labor department exceeded its authority when it finalized a rule earlier this year to significantly expand overtime pay for salaried workers ruling that the department could not prioritize employee wages over job duties when determining eligibility. Now, I don't even know what that means, but what's hilarious about this is that we already had the threshold. All they did was raise the threshold. So the threshold, the 35,000 is still in place. So why is 35,000? Okay? But 43,000 is not right. See, your legal argument actually doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Not that I'm saying I want you to go back and get rid of the threshold altogether, but how can you say that one threshold is no, but other

Threshold is yes, like they have the authority to do this one, but totally can't do this one. That doesn't make any legal sense at all. But I wanna explain something to people. This was a Trump appointed judge. Millions of people in this country just went to the polls and voted for Donald Trump because they thought he's gonna help my economic situation, right? Donald Trump is gonna make things better. I'm gonna have more money. This is what you get from Donald Trump. These are the types of judges he puts in place. Judges that will side with businesses every single time they get the chance and they just screwed millions of people out of overtime pay. Millions of people will lose thousands of dollars because of Donald Trump's decisions.