The Time Has Come
We’ve got another news update for you regarding overtime regulations. The time has come. It is all but certain that overtime will go fully into effect on November 13, 2015. So, we will be gearing up and getting ready. It will mean some significant changes to our way of doing service, but we are confident we will be able to come up with creative and innovative ways to keep our clients at the center of what we do. If you are one of our Bay Area staff and you attended the All Hands Meetings last week, this will be the information Eric Hess (CFO) talked about.
Below is a news article released from CDCAN with a detailed account of what is happening with overtime.
BREAKING NEWS:
FEDERAL APPEALS COURT DENIES MOTION FOR STAY OF ITS AUGUST 21ST ORDER THAT REINSTATED FEDERAL OVERTIME REGULATIONS FOR PREVIOUSLY EXEMPT HOME CARE WORKERS – APPEAL TO US SUPREME COURT WILL CONTINUE BUT WITHOUT A STAY OF APPEALS COURT ORDER
SACRAMENTO, CA [CDCAN LAST UPDATED 09/18/2015 03:06 PM] – Barring another appeal, Federal overtime regulations for previously exempted home care workers will go into effect in mid-November following a federal appeals court order issued today in Washington, DC that denied a motion by home care associations for a stay of the appeals court decision of August 21st that ruled in favor of the US Department of Labor, reinstating those regulations that a lower federal court in January had struck down. The appeals court also issued an order denying a motion by the US Department of Labor that asked the court to expedite or speed up the time period when its August 21st decision would take effect.
Under normal appeals court rules, a decision by the appeals court takes effect 52 days after it is handed down (45 days to allow either party to appeal its decision, and another 7 days after that for the court clerk to file the decision to make it official). That would make the August 21st court order effective on October 13th. However the US Department of Labor previously posted an announcement on its website that the federal regulations on overtime for previously exempted workers would take effect 30 days AFTER the August 21st court order went into effect, which would mean sometime in mid-November.
The plaintiffs – those who filed the original lawsuit trying to stop the regulations – had wanted a longer delay or a stay of the August 21st ruling while they appealed the case to the US Supreme Court. That appeal to the high court will continue – but the federal regulations, barring other legal action – can take effect while that appeal to the US Supreme goes forward.
In California, state officials previously said it would implement the state overtime provisions when pending lawsuit was resolved. Some officials have indicated that “resolved” means “clarified”, so that if the federal appeals court denies the request (motion) of the home care associations to further delay its order beyond October 13th while the case is being appealed, that the State would seemingly have the authority or green light to implement overtime 30 days or so after that when the federal government indicated it would implement the regulations (barring a further delay by the appeals court). However no official word from state officials on implementation has been released.
Here is what this means for Compass:
Because we were faced with this back in December & January, we know what to expect. We have a system that we intend to implement that will take these regulations and make them work for us within the budget we have been given.
Further, your Case Facilitator’s and their assistants will be contacting family, clients and staff in the next month to talk about what the new schedule is going to look like.
We do want to be clear and say that Compass fully supports regulations that intend to give our staff more money. While that is the intention behind these new regulations, the problem is there is no plan to provide the necessary funding to pay out overtime fees. This means we will need to be creative with scheduling and work with the budgets we have.
What we don’t want is to see our people lose money. Our hearts are for you and your livelihood is important to us. Unfortunately, as we have learned many times in this industry, there are no guarantees.
With that being said, we at Compass can provide you with a guarantee:
We will continue to partner with our amazing staff to make sure our beloved clients get the quality of support they need.