Seyfarth Synopsis: On May 8, 2017, Governor Nathan Deal signed a law expanding the reach of a pre-existing statute that prohibits Georgia localities from passing ordinances affecting worker pay in Georgia. The amendment is in line with a trend of states’ laws proactively limiting counties’ and cities’ abilities to promulgate ordinances that exceed worker protections that state and federal laws provide.
House Bill 243, authored by Representative Bill Werkheiser (R – Glennville), amends the Georgia Minimum Wage Law to preempt any local government rules requiring additional pay to employees based on schedule changes. The Georgia Minimum Wage Law already prohibited local governments, such as counties, municipal corporations, and consolidated governments, from adopting mandates requiring an employer to pay any employee a wage rate or provide employment benefits not otherwise required under state or federal law.
Prior to the adoption of House Bill 243, the Georgia Minimum Wage Law defined “employment benefits” to mean “anything of value that an employee may receive from an employer in addition to wages and salary,” including but not limited to, “any health benefits; disability benefits; death benefits; group accidental death and dismemberment benefits; paid days off for holidays, sick leave, vacation, and personal necessity; retirement benefits; and profit-sharing benefits.” House Bill 243 amends the definition of “employment benefits” to include “additional pay based on schedule changes.”
According to the National Federation of Independent Business, House Bill 243 benefits employers by protecting them from predictive scheduling requirements, which are intended to require employers to set employees’ work schedules in advance and pay an employee for lost or adjusted time if the schedule changes after the employer initially sets it. Proponents of the Bill argued that members of the food, service, and retail industries rely heavily on scheduling flexibility to serve their customers, and that these business realities justified the Bill’s protection from predictive scheduling requirements that localities might promulgate if it were not passed into law.
The Georgia Minimum Wage Law and this new amendment to it are part of the larger wave of so-called preemption bills, which seek to preclude localities from enacting ordinances that impose additional obligations on employers operating within their boundaries. Numerous states, including South Carolina, Minnesota, Tennessee, Missouri, and Arkansas, have either passed or considered similar preemption laws. While the laws in these several states (each of which is generally perceived to be business-friendly) should provide some solace to employers on the lookout for business-impacting local laws, they also highlight the need for caution in states whose legislatures are less willing to restrict cities’ and counties’ from passing worker protection laws.
