Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

In December of 2020, the DOL under President Trump issued a final rule dispensing with the longstanding “80/20” tip credit rule—whereby an employer was only required to pay a tipped-employee the full minimum wage rate for non-tip producing work if the employee spent in excess of 20% of their workweek performing such work. In early 2021, the DOL under President Biden delayed the effective date of the Trump-era rule (initially until April 30, 2021, then again until December 31, 2021).

In a development that will impact postsecondary institutions of higher education throughout the country, yesterday the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (“OCR”) issued a guidance letter explaining that the Department will no longer enforce a controversial Trump-era amendment to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. § 1681 (“Title IX”), shortly after the provision was vacated by a Massachusetts federal district court and remanded to the Department for further consideration and explanation.

The United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts ruled this week that a controversial Title IX amendment by the Trump-era Department of Education was “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act and ordered that the rule be vacated and remanded to the Department for further consideration and explanation.

On July 29, 2021, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a final rule rescinding the Trump-era “Joint Employer Status Under the Fair Labor Standards Act” rule (29 CFR part 791), which went into effect on March 16, 2020.