Nicholas Covers Beginning of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division Under Trump

Partner James Nicholas was quoted in a Law360 article, “DOL Wage and Hour Division Getting in Gear After Slow Start,” covering the changes of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division under the Trump administration, including the return of opinion letters.

“Judicial opinion has far more force than administrative interpretations or opinion letters, but they are given deference to a degree,” Nicholas explained. “There are pragmatic judges out there who will completely disregard opinion letters because they change with administration. … It matters less to those types of pragmatic judges than would the force of another case, or the force of statute or regulation.”

Nicholas added: “Everything they’ve telegraphed so far is that some of the punitive measures that would have been instituted under Obama’s DOL won’t necessarily be there now, and protections that the Obama administration’s DOL were interested in pursuing, they’re not being pursued by the Trump administration.”