Late yesterday afternoon, a federal district court in Texas issued a nationwide injunction order preventing the United States Department of Labor from enforcing new wage and hour regulations that were set to go into effect on December 1, 2016. Those regulations included an increase in the minimum salary amount for exempt employees, from $455 per week currently to a new level of $913 per week (or $47,476 per year).

We have been working with many of you on plans to either reclassify or increase the salaries for employees who had been treated as exempt up to now but who fell below the new $913 per week standard. And we know that many of you have fully developed plans in place for those changes, and may already have communicated those changes to your employees.

With this last-minute suspension of rules that we thought were going into effect next week, we know you will have questions about whether or how to change your plans and how to communicate any changes to your employees. We are available to answer your questions about the impact of this order and to help you form a strategy for moving forward. To discuss your specific situation with our employment law team, please contact Sarah Crippen, Joel Schroeder or Ashleigh Leitch.