Florida Businesses Should Prepare For New Overtime Rule

The article, “Florida Businesses Should Prepare For New Overtime Rule,” featured in WLRN, discussed why Florida businesses should begin preparing for the new federal rules that will extend overtime benefits.

“They should definitely start to prepare now if they haven’t already started to prepare,” said Christine Howard. “One thing they should think about is who’s going to look at the workforce to determine whether there are certain job classifications that may be impacted because those individuals in those jobs aren’t paid currently at $913 a week or $47,476.”

She said businesses should start looking at the employees they don’t pay overtime, who they pay on a salary basis and then determine if those employee’s salaries are at an annualized $47,000.

“If you’re going to keep people as exempt because they satisfy this new threshold figure, you’re still going to want to make sure that they satisfy the exemption,” Christine said.

“For example, doctors, lawyers, teachers among others, those don’t require a minimum salary, Howard said. “There are certain carve out for those types of professions.”

“It may be as simple as going to that employee and saying we can no longer pay you on a salary basis we have to convert you to hourly,” Howard said. “While somebody may have been working 60 hours a week you hire two people that work 30 hours a week so there’s going to be different situations and scenarios that employers will have to review and consider.”

Christine advised employers to take their time when beginning the process of adapting the overtime rule change and to do it sooner rather than later.

“Now’s a good time to do it because if you’re making the changes, it’s much more palatable to employees to understand why you’re making the change now,” she said.

To read the full article, please visit WLRN.