Background: "The Family Time Flexibility Act"

May 1, 2003

Please take action now!

Winding its way through Congress is regressive Republican legislation that would take away already limited flexibility over hours and wages from workers and hand it to their employers. The House bill, deceptively entitled "The Family Time Flexibility Act" (H.R. 1119), was introduced by Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) in March. On April 9, it was voted out of the House Education and the Workforce Committee by a vote of 27-22. The similarly titled Senate bill, "The Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act" (S. 317) was introduced in February by Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and has been referred to committee. House Republican leaders have expressed their intentions to bring this corporate-friendly bill to the House floor for a vote in May.

H.R. 1119 and S. 317 constitute an frontal attack on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which requires employers to pay overtime to certain employees when they are required to work beyond the normal 40 hour work week. "The Family Time Flexibility Act" and "The Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act" are not family-friendly in any way. In fact, they aim to dismantle the most basic family-friendly provision on the books—the 40 hour workweek—giving carte blanche permission to employers to work their employees almost unlimited hours. It is important to note that already the average employee in the U.S. now works 350 hours more per year than does the typical European worker. NOW believes that this legislation is indeed a return to the bad old days when workers were exploited to the maximum. This bill must be stopped in its tracks!

The Bush administration is pushing this bill and related changes to long-standing rules in the Department of Labor that affect workers' rights. Some of these proposals would have profound impacts on millions of workers and would be especially harmful for working women by:

• Excluding previously protected workers who were entitled to overtime by reclassifying them as managers, thereby making them ineligible for overtime pay;
• Eliminating certain moderate-income workers from overtime protections by drastically lowering the maximum salary level at which workers are guaranteed overtime pay for work beyond 40 hours;
• Removing overtime protection from large numbers of workers in aerospace, defense, health care, high tech and other industries; and
• Allowing employers to give even protected workers "comp time" in lieu of overtime pay.

For businesses doing poorly in this weak economy, this bill is a windfall. In a recent report, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) explains how, under this bill, employers would essentially take out an interest-free loan from their employees by not paying their for overtime hours worked now in exchange for time off over up to a year from now. According to EPI, "A company with 200,000 FLSA-covered employees might get 160 free hours at $7 an hour from each of them (160 hours is the maximum allowed under the bills). That's the equivalent of $224 million that the company wouldn't have to pay its workers for up to a year after the worker has earned it. Considering that, under normal circumstances, the employer might have to pay six percent interest for a commercial loan of this magnitude, it could save $13 million by relying on comp time to 'borrow' from its employees instead."

And if, during that 13 month waiting period, your company happens to be one of the hundreds of thousands of companies that close their doors each year (200,000 in 2000) then you forfeit both the overtime pay and the time off—up to a 160 hours. For employees making $10/hour, losing 160 hours of overtime pay is a loss of $2400.

H.R. 1119 and S. 317 pose a serious threat—not only do they seek to undermine workers' most basic rights, they also have friends in high places. The Associated Press reports that "business groups, emboldened by the complete Republican control of Congress and the federal executive branch" are pressing the Bush administration to rewrite labor law—in a way that benefits business and disadvantages workers, we might add. The National Organization for Women opposes this legislation as a serious step backwards in protecting worker rights and harming women and their families. Please take action now.

Further information is available from the Economic Policy Institute.