Tag: fresh

  • DOL files fresh appeal of a Texas decision vacating its new overtime rule

    DOL files fresh appeal of a Texas decision vacating its new overtime rule

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    Dive Brief:

    • The U.S. Department of Labor has appealed a Texas federal judge’s 2024 decision blocking its Biden-era final rule which sought to expand overtime pay protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act, according to a Feb. 28 court filing.
    • Last December, Judge Sam Cummings of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled against DOL in Flint Avenue, LLC v. U.S. Department of Labor, vacating and setting aside the final rule. Cummings’ decision came just over one month after another Texas judge similarly vacated and set aside the rule in a separate lawsuit filed by the state of Texas and parties including the Plano Chamber of Commerce.
    • The appeal takes Flint Avenue to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court in which DOL filed an appeal of the decision in the State of Texas case last year. DOL’s public affairs staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the DOL, did not respond to a request for comment submitted via its online form.

    Dive Insight:

    The Feb. 28 notice of appeal may come as a surprise to employers who expected the Trump administration to abandon the final rule; attorneys who previously spoke to HR Dive said that the rule was effectively “dead” despite DOL’s State of Texas appeal because of the Trump administration’s conservative policy stance on overtime.

    In fact, the new administration had already filed motions in the 5th Circuit pertinent to overtime rule litigation. On Jan. 22, two days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, DOJ attorneys sent a letter to the 5th Circuit requesting a 30-day extension on the deadline set by the court to file an opening brief in the State of Texas appeal. The court granted the request and the agency’s filing deadline is currently set to March 7.

    The April 2024 final rule proposed a two-step process that would have eventually raised the minimum annual salary threshold for overtime pay eligibility under the FLSA from $35,568 to $58,656 by Jan. 1, 2025. The rule would then have implemented a mechanism for automatically adjusting the threshold every three years using current wage data beginning in July 2027.

    But a series of Texas court decisions froze the rule. The judge in State of Texas held that the rule exceeded DOL’s authority and was unlawful. Likewise, Cummings said in his decision that he found the State of Texas judge’s reasoning “persuasive,” and he adopted the same reasoning in ruling for the plaintiffs.

    There is some intrigue in how the 5th Circuit might rule on the two appealed judgments given that the court signed off on DOL’s overall use of a salary basis test for determining overtime pay eligibility in last year’s Mayfield v. U.S. Department of Labor. The Mayfield plaintiffs alleged that the salary basis test had no basis in the FLSA’s text, but the 5th Circuit disagreed. The court did hold, however, that DOL “cannot enact rules that replace or swallow the meaning” of the FLSA’s text, adding that particular salary threshold may raise legal issues because of their size.

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  • Can your story stay fresh?

    Can your story stay fresh?

    At News Decoder we publish stories intended to help young people understand the wider world they live in. To do that we look for stories in places that are underreported and on problems that many people in many places are struggling to solve.

    But we don’t expect our readers to read these stories the second we publish. Young people are busy and teachers might want to focus a class on a particular topic weeks if not months after we publish. So our stories are meant to be “evergreen.” 

    That’s a journalism term to mean that a story is about something that isn’t just happening now. It will still be relevant a year from now or two or three years in the future. 

    But it is a challenge to write a story that will grab readers’ attention now and still be worth reading a year from now. 

    The prize is that you get new readers all the time. We have stories on News Decoder that reappear on our most-read list years after we originally published them as the topics become hot and people search for information on them. 

    Make your story “evergreen”.

    So how do you make a story that isn’t necessarily time-sensitive grab a reader’s attention and at the same time be relevant for those who come to it much later? We’ll show you.

    1. Take the time and space to explain events and their context. This way readers in the future will understand what the heck you are talking about. Right now a lot of people are talking about DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative created by U.S. President Donald Trump and led by the world’s richest person Elon Musk. But two years from now who knows? DOGE might be all but forgotten. 

    2. Connect what is happening now to universal concepts. Musk and DOGE are systematically going through the U.S. government laying off thousands of people and cutting funding to thousands of programs. These moves are affecting programs that involve food, health, housing, travel, education and recreation. Those are topics people are always concerned about and interested in. Chances are, a year from now a top news event will concern the government and one of those things and your story will connect to it. 

    3. Connect what is happening now to events in the past. In this way you show your audience how the past repeats and how the present is affected by what has happened before. For readers coming in much later they can start connecting what happened when the story was first published to what is happening in their world when they read it.

    For the past year, we’ve been republishing articles that connect to something happening now. We call it our Decoder Replay. On 19 February, for instance, we republished a story about how China censors mentions of the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre that occurred in 1989 because now a Chinese artificial intelligence program called DeepSeek seems to negate any reference to Tiananmen Square. 

    The week before we republished a story from 2020 about the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in fighting the Covid pandemic. Then U.S. President Donald Trump had denounced the WHO. We connected it to now President Trump pulling the United States out of the WHO.

    One of the reasons many people feel disconnected from news articles is that the articles focus on “news” — what is happening now even when such things don’t have much relevance in people’s lives — isolated crimes that happen far away, for example.

    So next time you decide to take on a hot topic, think about the readers who come to the story six months from now, or a year from now. How might the story resonate with them?

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