How Slapshot Stole Christmas

Special investigator Max Littman reveals how Ohio State president Ted "Slapshot" Carter's Grinch-like attitude betrayed workers weeks before Christmas.

It was 6:30 p.m. the Friday before Thanksgiving when Jessica absentmindedly checked her work email from home.

She was surprised to see an email from Ohio State, her employer, stating, “Pay impact to you from recent court decisions on [the Federal Labor Standards Act].”

In that email, she learned that her pay was being reduced by thousands of dollars, effective January 1st.

In April 2024, the US Department of Labor increased the threshold for overtime-exempt employees, which caused Ohio State to increase the salaries of previously overtime-exempt employees to match the new threshold.

The change to stop salary employees at Ohio State from being able to collect overtime pay took effect on November 1st. Two weeks later, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down the April ruling, lowering the overtime-exempt limit to its original level.

Before the Department of Labor’s ruling, the overtime-exempt limit was $35,568; it was raised to $43,888 in July and set to rise to $58,656 on January 1st.

A ruling by the notoriously evil Eastern District of Texas invalidated both increases, restoring the limit to $35,568.

Ohio State had just over 300 employees whose pay was adjusted due to this change, totaling around two million dollars in increased salaries for those employees. The salary increases, done via a legal document signed by employees and Human Resource representatives, set the new employee pay rates.

The Friday evening email reversed that.

Official university headshot of SVP Katie Hall.

Within a week of the federal decision to lower the salary threshold, Ohio State Human Resources, under the leadership of Senior Vice President Katie Hall ($516,000 annual salary), decided that the best course of action was not to let those employees maintain their legally agreed-upon pay rate.

Instead, the university cut the pay of those affected employees, who are already amongst the lowest-paid employees, effective January 1st.

Ohio State Human Resources wrote to employees:

As a result of the reversal in the law, you will no longer receive an increase in your base pay. Out of concern for the effect this change has on your ability to plan ahead, we are allowing you to retain the increase to your base pay for the months of November and December.

We know this is disappointing, and we want to provide a six-week advance notice that will give you time to plan ahead. Given the reversal in the law, we will continue to focus on impact and decisions that consider all of our staff and the University.

Ohio State failed to mention that this change was not required by law or necessary.

The rise in the affected employees' pay would keep them ineligible for overtime.

The only impact would be the $2 million in additional employee salary, an almost literal drop in the bucket of the university's $9.9 billion in expenses (not to mention the $500 million the Ohio State projects to save in 2025).

Ohio State University employee Jessica spoke to The Rooster on a condition of anonymity to prevent employer blowback.

Jessica, whose name has been changed by The Rooster to protect her identity, has been with the university for years.

She told The Rooster that upon hearing the news, her first reaction was, “What the fuck,” before texting her supervisors, who told her they had not been informed of anything involving her pay.

They were not only unaware of her pay reduction but recognized her hard work and worked with the university to raise her pay throughout the process.

Upon learning of the court decision, Ohio State HR leadership worked with individual affected departments to identify impacted employees whose pay should be raised and those whose pay should be kept and changed to salary non-exempt.

The pay reduction couldn’t have come at a worse time for many employees, right into the holiday season and taking effect immediately after the new year.

Asked about the aftermath of the pay cut, Jessica said, “To be honest, yeah, we made life decisions (because of it); we’re trying to buy a house and shifted my pay increase to the house fund to try to buy a house.”

She also turned down another job offer based on her new pay scale.

“I was also approached for another job at Ohio State with more upward mobility. It would’ve been a pay increase with my old salary, but I turned it down because I thought the new salary would outweigh the cons of starting another position.”

It’s not a small pay reduction, either.

For Jessica, it’s hundreds of dollars a paycheck, and she said that she knows multiple employees whose annual pay was reduced by over $10,000.

“I feel for the other folks for whom this money was going to make a difference for Christmas and the rest of their lives. You really can’t find many employees paid lower here, and the university has already very quickly fallen behind in pay compared to other universities or jobs.”

Ohio State Human Resources also doesn’t seem to realize the human impact of cutting so many employees' pay.

When asked about her future plans, Jessica said, “I’m one hundred percent thinking about leaving Ohio State now because of this. I’ve been aggrieved for a bit, to be honest, over a lot of leadership decisions, but this is definitely the breaking point.

“This would’ve been the breaking point even if I wasn’t aggrieved about anything else.”

For her part, Jessica was more saddened by the impact this decision would have on students and other employees with whom she works.

“I feel so bad for the other people involved. There are a lot of great people at Ohio State; the people making this decision need to know there are so many additional people frustrated over their decisions. It seems they care about the money and lining people’s pockets, not the people taking care of the students, which is the university’s mission.”

For Ohio State and beleaguered President Ted “Slapshot” Carter ($1.1 million annual salary), is $2 million worth a mass exodus of employees who have been underpaid and mistreated? The answer is almost certainly yes, as they stray further and further from the university’s founding land-grant mission.

After dropping such horrible news to employees, it would only seem logical for HR to take a kind and sympathetic stance after torching Christmas for hard-working employees. After finding out the news, Jessica emailed her HR rep questions about the decision and was told by her rep that he was “looking into answers.”

It’s been two weeks without a follow-up with those answers, and it seems that they might not even exist.

The easiest answer seems to be not to trust Ohio State President Ted Carter or Ohio State Senior Vice President of HR Katie Hall and, maybe most importantly, find somewhere else to work.

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