I actually submitted a complaint to the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules complaining about that the rules so vague that they allowed the IDOL to event policy at their own whim. I was not an attorney at the time, or a law student, but the complaint detailed a case by the IDOL which was simply absurd. Surprisingly, I did hear back, and there was agreement that at least some of the rules violated the Code of Administrative Rules. In the end the IDOL had to give an employee 15 days to intervene or object to regarding the findings of the case, and that the employee had to be notified of the actual results. Prior to then the employer had a 15day time limit, but the employee had to “timely” submit his notice, without any number of days (in the case in question I submitted the request before they had mailed the notice, then sent a second a week later–the first was deemed untimely, the second request was barred by RES JUDICATA based on the first being denied.

Anyway, the change only made it harder for IDOL to get rid of any case at any time, but not much harder.

The point is, if they took me serious enough to make a change, perhaps the U.S. DOL would take a number of actual lawyers petitions concerning the inadequacy of certain rules, perhaps the rules could be straitened out to avoid such outcomes.

Judge Scheindlin is absolutely correct about the existence of a “carve-out” exclusive to lower-level police executives, and the present legal situation is absurd. CA4 has obviously gone much too far applying its doctrine of concurrency, by holding that it is even conceivable that one could adequately administer and manage a recognized subdivision of an enterprise while 99% of one’s time and attention is consumed performing menial tasks. DoL has obviously gone too far in failing to notice that police sergeants, whose facial primary responsibility is the adminisration and management of front-line patrol officers, are executives by any rational sense of that word.

Unfortunately Mullins, as a case, has been contaminated by remarkably toxic actions on the part of NYC police top brass, a circumstance which is applying a distorting gravitational field upon the whole messy controversy.

What these courts probably don’t understand is that defendants often, if not always, refuse to produce actual payroll data or other information that would allow the Plaintiff attorneys to perform the required calculation. If it is produced, it is often produced in paper or in a pdf format that takes many many hours to input into a spreadsheet.