Working families are bracing for another attack on their paychecks by the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. This new assault on working families’ pocketbooks follows President George W. Bush’s successful, corporate-backed fight to cut millions of workers’ overtime pay protections.
This year, Bush will push for new legislation to allow employers to substitute compensatory time off for time-and-a-half overtime pay. The White House also is likely to push a so-called “flex-time” bill to replace the 40-hour workweek with an 80-hour, two-week pay period.
Both proposals would force employees to work longer hours for less pay, unions and other workers’ advocates say.
In 2004, Bush enacted the biggest rollback of overtime pay rights since passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938, with regulatory changes that robbed some 6 million workers of the right to overtime pay. Congress repeatedly tried to block Bush’s overtime take-way with six bipartisan votes and millions of workers wrote their lawmakers in opposition to Bush’s overtime take-away—but the Bush administration implemented it anyway.
During a 2004 congressional hearing on the overtime rule changes, Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, concluded, “All in all, the rule means longer hours and less pay for millions of workers.”
