The Trump administration hasn’t acted yet on a stalled 2016 federal proposal to update U.S. overtime pay rules for the first time in 14 years. So, Gov. Wolf is pushing a proposal he says could boost overtime pay (or cut hours) for nearly half a million Pennsylvania workers by 2022.

The state Labor Department’s proposed rule would boost the minimum pay that low-level bosses and specialized workers would have to earn to be exempt from overtime, each year for the next three years, ending in 2022 at $921 a week — about $48,000 a year, writes Joseph N. DiStefano in the Philadelphia Daily News.

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That’s a little more than double the current national limit of $455 a week (almost $24,000) which employers can pay management, administrative, and professional help without having to pay overtime for extra hours. The limit would be updated every three years after 2022, to reflect changing regional wage levels.

Wolf’s proposal would set the overtime line a little higher than what the Obama administration had tried to impose without the support of Congress on Dec. 1, 2016 — until a federal judge in Texas, two weeks after Trump’s election, stalled the proposal, leaving it up to the new Republican president (and Congress) to review and refine the policy. Which hasn’t happened yet.

Wolf has followed Democrats in New York, California, and other “blue” states that have set higher overtime triggers — plus New Jersey, with its Pay Equity Act, and Philadelphia with several liberal employment laws that have upset Comcast and other big employers —  in pushing labor policies that go beyond minimum U.S. government requirements, Kirshenbaum told me. (She expects Trump’s Labor Department will eventually update the federal overtime rule in the near future; as with minimum wages, states are free to set higher limits.)

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