In today’s news and commentary, the Third Circuit tosses the DOL’s $35.8 million healthcare wage verdict, the Trump administration’s NLRB nominee for a critical Board majority gets Senate hearing next week, and the Harvard Graduate Students Union ends their 40-day strike. 

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit tossed the Department of Labor’s (DOL) $35.8 million healthcare wage verdict. Chief Judge Michael A. Chagares, writing for the majority, held that the district court had wrongly included “overtime” gap time – pay for non-overtime hours worked during a period in which the employee also worked overtime – when calculating the DOL’s damages award. Overtime gap time, the Third Circuit held, isn’t recoverable under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Judge William S. Stickman IV of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania had sided with the agency and ordered an award including overtime gap time pay after a 13-day bench trial in 2024. The Third Circuit joins the Second Circuit in a split with the Fourth Circuit, which considers such overtime gap time claims cognizable. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the Second and Fourth Circuit split in late 2022.

Also on Wednesday, the Senate scheduled a hearing for the Trump administration’s most recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) nominee. James Macy, the director of the Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, stands to be the critical third Republican member of the NLRB should his nomination succeed. Macy will appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on June 10th for the hearing before potentially moving to a full Senate confirmation floor vote. The committee will also consider David Prouty, the Board’s lone Democratic member, for renomination to a second five-year term. If Macy wins confirmation, the new Republican-majority Board will likely target Biden-era Board precedents, Bloomberg Law reports, “includ[ing] Cemex Construction Materials Pacific LLC, which created a new framework for policing union elections; Amazon.com Services LLC, which outlawed anti-union captive audience meetings; and McLaren Macomb, which barred severance agreements that require workers to waive their labor law rights.”  

On Monday, the Harvard Graduate Students Union–United Auto Workers (HGSU-UAW) ended their longest strike in union history after 40 days. The strike, which began April 21, saw graduate student workers withhold their labor through the end of the semester, disrupting classes and grading for undergraduate students and sustaining picket lines that impacted admitted students’ visiting days and commencement ceremonies. The strike ended without a settled contract, following a membership vote in which 81% of participating union members chose to return to work. Union leadership moved to end the strike after Harvard showed new willingness to move on key provisions regarding pay parity between research assistants and teaching fellows, paid family and medical leave, and discrimination and harassment grievance processes in their recent bargaining sessions. HGSU-UAW Vice President Evan R. Lemire stated, “This strike was not ended because the fight is over. The fight is not over, and we’re going to be continuing to fight for a new contract… If we have another reason to strike, we are prepared, willing, and ready to strike… Potentially for a long time.”