This Littler Lightbulb highlights some of the more significant employment law developments in federal courts of appeal in the last month.
Fifth Circuit Vacates DOL Tip Credit Rule
The FLSA permits employers to take a “tip credit” when paying the wages of “tipped employees,” paying these employees $2.13 per hour, below the federal $7.25 per hour minimum wage, based on the presumption that tips make up the difference. In Restaurant Law Center v. U.S. Department of Labor, __ F.4th __ (5th Cir. 2024), the Fifth Circuit vacated the U.S. DOL’s “80/20/30 Rule,” which defined three categories of work:
Under the DOL rule, if more than 20 percent of an employee’s workweek or more than 30 continuous minutes is spent on directly supporting work, the employer cannot claim the tip credit for that time, or any time spent on work not part of the tipped occupation. This approach, the Fifth Circuit stated, “applies the tip credit in a manner inconsistent with the FLSA’s text.” Noting that the FLSA does not ask whether duties comprising a tip-producing occupation “are themselves each individually tip-producing,” the court held that tip-producing work “cannot be twisted to mean being ‘engaged in duties that directly produce tips, or in duties that directly support such...
Dangote Group has dismissed as false and malicious a publication alleging that its President, Aliko Dangote, distanced himself from Tony Elumelu, describing the report as entirely baseless. In a s...