https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...overturns-obama-effort-to-expand-overtime-payA divided Supreme Court on Monday threw out an effort by the Obama administration to expand overtime laws to include a special class of workers at auto dealerships known as "service advisers."
In the 5-4 decision, the court's conservative justices said that despite some ambiguity in text of the law, Congress clearly meant to exempt service advisers from the requirement that they be paid time and a half after working 40 hours in a week.
Though the case, called Encino Motorcars v. Navarro, involved a limited class of employees, it was notable because it involved how far-reaching the Fair Labor Standards Act's overtime coverage is and how much wiggle room administrations have in interpreting it. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had said that any exemptions to the FLSA had to be construed as narrowly as possible, but the Supreme Court overruled that decision.
"We reject this principle as a useful guidepost for interpreting the FLSA. Because the FLSA gives no 'textual indication' that its exemptions should be construed narrowly, 'there is no reason to give [them] anything other than a fair (rather than a ‘narrow’) interpretation," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.