Dive Brief:
- A federal appeals court wrote Thursday that the U.S. Department of Labor’s interpretation of what constitutes an employee’s “primary duty” for the purposes of determining overtime eligibility still applies in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision upending agency deference doctrine.
- In Bennink v. Cincinnati Bell Telephone Co., LLC, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that a former information technology employee for Cincinnati Bell Telephone Co. was not owed overtime pay because his job duties met the “computer employee” exemption of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
- The 6th Circuit wrote that DOL’s primary duty guidance “gets it right” even after the high court’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling directed federal courts not to defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. The decision is at least the second time an appeals court has weighed in on DOL’s FLSA guidance following Loper Bright.
Dive Insight:
The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright prompted legal observers to question how the statutory interpretations of agencies like DOL might fare in the absence of the Chevron doctrine.
Under that doctrine — outlined by SCOTUS in 1984’s Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council — courts generally deferred to reasonable agency interpretations. In undoing Chevron, the high court directed courts to instead exercise independent judgment, though it also noted that the executive branch’s interpretations could inform courts’ inquiry.
The end of Chevron doctrine meant swift consequences for DOL specifically, with a federal judge blocking the Biden-era agency’s attempt at an updated overtime rule on the same day that Loper Bright had been handed down. One attorney and former DOL administrator previously told HR Dive that the decision could cause courts to closely scrutinize much of the agency’s regulatory guidance issued over the past several decades.
But the court in Bennink largely applied DOL’s interpretation of what constitutes a primary duty under the FLSA. It noted the agency’s definition of a “computer employee” includes a list of primary duties that matched several of those performed by the plaintiff. Even if some duties did not neatly map onto the exemption, the ones that did were “central” to his initial hiring and workload, supporting an inference that they constituted his primary duties, the court said.
As part of his argument that he did not meet the law’s computer employee exception, the plaintiff made note of his lack of formal training in computer systems or coding. But the FLSA does not include explicit requirements that a computer employee hold a particular degree, level of experience or job title, the court said, and DOL’s guidance also makes no such reference.
DOL’s overtime exemption test analyzes both job duties and salary to determine eligibility. Where the 6th Circuit weighed the former component in Bennink, the 5th Circuit analyzed the legality of the latter in a 2024 decision. There, the court upheld the department’s consideration of salary in determining the scope of FLSA’s exemption statute, but it clarified that the adoption of a particular salary level could raise issues if it is found to be inconsistent with the law’s structure.