Syracuse University is in its final stages of analysis as it adjusts to a new threshold for overtime pay.

Andy Gordon, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at SU, said the university has reviewed more than 1,000 job positions to see whether these employees would now be qualified for overtime pay.

The analysis, which has involved university leaders and administration from the budget office, took place over the summer, and Gordon said he will begin scheduling one-on-one meetings with employees within the next few weeks.

The university also announced Monday that employees who move from exempt to non-exempt will also be able to remain, at their choice, as salaried employees, while being eligible for overtime pay. This means their pay cycle will not change, Gordon said.

A new website, which features FAQs and a timeline, was also launched Monday to explain how SU is complying with the Fair Labor Standards Act. The university will begin communications with employees starting Oct. 17 and continuing until Dec. 1 — the effective date of the new rule.

“Our goal was to ensure that all employees are paid appropriately for the jobs they actually do,” Gordon said.

In May, the United States Department of Labor raised the maximum salary needed for employees to qualify for overtime pay, meaning more than 4 million people will now be qualified for extra compensation.

The original threshold, which hasn’t been changed since 2004, set the weekly salary at $455, or $23,660 annually. The new threshold sets the weekly salary at $913, or $47,476 annually.

The threshold will be updated every three years starting in January 2020, according to the Department of Labor website.

Gordon said there is no figure yet to how much the new rule will cost the university. This amount will probably be determined over the next year as each college plans its budget and unit officers monitor overtime, he said.

Another new implication of the overtime rule is that the university is allowing employees who are being reassigned from exempt to non-exempt to retain their benefits associated with the exempt status, such as vacation time, salary continuation and parking privileges, Gordon said.

“What we’re trying to do is be fair, consistent across the university, and the feeling was, we were going to do whatever we could do to have the least amount of disruption to any employee in this change from exempt to non-exempt, because at the end of the day it’s simply the classification by the federal government,” Gordon said.

Kandice Salomone, associate dean of advising and career services in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she is pleased to know the university is allowing employees to keep these benefits.

“I think it would be good for the university to get out in front of that so that staff believed the university had their best interests at heart,” Salomone said.

Alfonso Flores-Lagunes, an economics professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said this is an overdue change and coming at a good time.

“This would be very hard to consider if we were in recession, for instance,” Flores-Lagunes said. “It is definitely true that it will imply some added costs … to the firm, to the businesses. But the demand for goods and services in the economy is strong.”

Overall, Flores-Lagunes said the responses to the new rules can be described in two different dimensions: Administration and strategic. Administration reactions will have to do with changes in how salaries are accounted for by human resources. The strategic reactions will be how firms can achieve their labor goals in the lowest possible cost, Flores-Lagunes said.

“In the past, (firms) were meeting their needs by having employees working longer hours because they didn’t need to pay overtime,” he said. “Now, firms will have to re-optimize their decisions taking in consideration that … overtime will be more expensive.”

Whether this new rule will be a positive or negative change for employees will be based on an individual basis, said Maria O’Brien Hylton, a professor of law at Boston University.

“I think all interventions in the labor market, you end up with winners and losers. I think if I was working 60 hours a week and I was now going to get overtime for 20 of those hours, I would be a winner … it would raise my income substantially,” Hylton said. “If, on the other hand, I am working somewhere 60 hours a week and now my employer cuts my hours back … arguably I’m a loser.”

Flores-Lagunes said he doesn’t think there will be any negative long-term effects in the economy. Rather, the main effects will be in the short-term as employers adjust, he said. There is some concern that a very large threshold change overnight will be a tough adjustment, he said, but otherwise the downside is the implementation of the change, not the change itself.

Additionally, there might be some special cases that occur that the threshold hasn’t accounted for, Flores-Lagunes said. For example, some employees might be paid through a grant from the federal government, rather than the university. Until that contract is over, the employee’s salary might be in a period of adjustment, he said.

Nevertheless, both Hylton and Flores-Lagunes agreed the threshold update every three years is positive.

“They are building in the mechanisms for this threshold to adjust over time, for a few years down the road so we won’t be in the same situation,” Flores-Lagunes said.

As for what this new rule means for students, Salomone said services will remain the same and not be impacted at all.

“Everyone, I suspect, at least in my crew, their responsibilities will remain the same,” she said.

Published on October 10, 2016 at 11:48 pm

Contact Haley: hykim100@syr.edu