Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC office, was quoted in Law360, in “DOL’s Tip Guidance Protects Workers’ Wages, 9th Circ. Told,” by Cara Bayles. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
Waiters, bartenders and other service workers told the en banc Ninth Circuit on Tuesday that they’re underpaid for tasks that don’t garner tips, saying a three-judge panel erred in favoring restaurant owners who’d challenged a 2016 U.S. Department of Labor administrative guidance on minimum wage exemptions for tipped employees. …
Paul DeCamp of Epstein Becker & Green, who represents the employers in the appeal, said the panel and Judge McNamee had made the right call, and that the DOL had stretched its power too far.
DeCamp warned the judges that “this wonky, in-the-rabbit-hole wage and hour rule” raised a separation of powers issue. If the court allowed the DOL to get away with “going as far afield as they did of the statute that Congress enacted,” he said, it would create a slippery slope for other executive branch agencies trying to write rules to get around federal laws. …
“What the department has done here is distorted the original focus — which is the occupation, whether the duties are related to the occupation — and instead has made it about whether the duties are related to tips,” he said
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