Request By:
Honorable Herman W. Rattliff
State Representative
51st District
Route 3
Campbellsville, Kentucky 42718
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; Martin Glazer, Assistant Attorney General
This is in reply to your letter of April 17, 1979 in which you seek answers to the questions about Kentucky minimum wages. You want to know whether employees of units of state and local governments and local school boards are required to be paid by state or federal minimum wage standards. You also request that we consider that some of the funds used to pay some of the employees and teachers are federal, both CETA and otherwise.
We cannot answer your letter with any degree of accuracy without knowing the exact positions covered or considered. However, we may reply generally.
As a general rule, employees of units of state and local government are not subject to the federal minimum wage law. Although Congress, in 1974, amended the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act to include employees of governmental units, the Supreme Court of the United States in a case entitled League of Cities v. Ussery held such statute unconstitutional as it applied to state and local governments. Therefore, the federal minimum wage does not cover those employees.
In the case of CETA employees, those persons are paid almost entirely by federal funds and the federal statutes which authorized such payments specifically provide that the allowances to those employees must either be not less than the federal minimum wage or state or local minimum wage if such state or local minimum wage is higher (see 29 U.S.C. § 821).
However, in Kentucky, the federal minimum wage presently at $2.90 per hour is higher than the state minimum wage which is $2.00 per hour and which goes to $2.15 per hour on July 1 of this year. So, CETA employees must presently be paid at least $2.90 per hour. Other local governments must pay at least the state minimum wage. The 1978 General Assembly amended the state minimum wage law to exclude from the state minimum wage certain state employees subject to the provisions of KRS Chapter 7 (Legislative Research Commission), Chapter 16 (State Police), Chapter 27A (Judicial Support Agencies and persons), Chapter 30A (Court personnel such as clerks, deputy clerks, etc.), and Chapter 18 (state employees under the merit system and cental state government). In other words, those types of state employees are not covered by the state minimum wage law. Local governmental employees, that is, employees of cities and counties and district school boards would be covered by the state minimum wage law, but not by the federal law unless they are under direct federal grants which require the payment of federal minimum wages. School teachers would ordinarily not be covered by the state minimum wage because they operate in a professional capacity and if their salaries are above a certain level (minimum of $155.00 per week), they would be excluded from the state minimum wage.
Therefore, to recap, state and local employees are generally not covered by federal minimum wage. Most state employees are not covered by the state minimum wage but local employees are covered by the state minimum wage. CETA employees are covered by the federal minimum wage because that is required by CETA law and the federal minimum wage is higher than the state of Kentucky's minimum wage. School teachers are professional persons and since they make at least $155.00 per week, they would be excluded from the state minimum wage.