The National Labor Relations Board has held that companies do not violate the National Labor Relations Act solely by misclassifying employees as independent contractors. Bottom line: the decision to classify an individual as an independent contractor rather than an employee will not, by itself, subject an employer to liability under the National Labor Relations Act.

The U.S. Department of Labor's rule to increase the salary threshold for the overtime exemption of executive, administrative and professional employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act has not yet been finalized.

The March 7 proposed rule was open for comments for a 60-day period. The Department of Labor received more than 116,000 public comments. The Department of Labor sent its final draft of the rule to the White House and the Office of Management and Budget on Aug. 12. The text of the final rule has not been made public.

When the final rule is published with an effective date, many expect unions and worker advocates to mount legal challenges to the rule. Even though the final rule may be challenged, it would be wise to be developing a plan now to address this huge budgetary issue.

This column focuses on the standard salary threshold, which will have the most dramatic impact on your company, and offers an action plan to address the standard salary threshold increase.

As we celebrate joining together SNPA and Inland, it is worth at least a moment to honor the first principles of the newspaper industry that gave rise to both groups. And those, without a doubt, are freedom of the press and the parallel right to know and to distribute news.

Honoring those principles requires some reflection on the industry's singular role in building America's First Amendment foundation. And it is safe to say that SNPA's and Inland's member newspapers can fairly take credit for shaping the free speech and free press tradition of the republic like no other industry and, for that matter, like no other country on earth.