President Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary expressed support for increasing above the 2004 level the salary threshold at which overtime must be paid to employees, but declined to commit to defend the rate put in place by the Obama administration.
During Alexander Acosta’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Wednesday, Chairman Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, criticized the Obama administration’s move to extend overtime benefits to millions more workers and pressed Acosta on his views.
Acosta said it was unfortunate that such a threshold could go unchanged for over a decade, but that doubling the limit as Obama attempted “does create what I’ll call a stress on the system.”
Senators from both parties sought to pin Acosta down on how we would handle the rule, without great success. Acosta told South Carolina Republican Tim Scott that he understood the senators’ desire to know what he would do, but "this is an incredibly complicated rule," he said.
"What I would say is I understand the extreme economic impact that a doubling has in certain parts of the economy," Acosta said. "Because of the size of the increase there are serious questions as to whether the secretary of labor even has the power to enact this in the first place."
That did not seem to satisfy Scott, who told the nominee, "These are things that you should be contemplating already."
Overtime Impact
Asked about the issue by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the committee’s ranking Democrat, Acosta said, “the overtime rule hasn’t been updated since 2004 we now see an update that is a very large revision and something that needs to be considered is the impact it has on the economy, on nonprofits, on geographic areas that have lower wages. But I’m also very sensitive to the fact that it hasn’t been updated since 2004.”
In a fiery exchange, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren pressed Acosta repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to commit to leave in place the rule enacted under Obama making standards more stringent for exposure to cancer-causing silica dust.