Amid endless political cacophony in Washington, D.C., House Republicans are quietly advancing legislation that would drive a freight train through a central tenet of New Deal-era labor law: overtime.
Earlier this year, Republicans introduced the Working Families Flexibility Act, a bill that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to allow private-sector employers to offer workers comp time instead of the premium time-and-a-half pay for overtime hours worked.
As the bill proposes, workers would have the option to get an hour and a half of paid time off in the future instead of cash for every hour of overtime worked—an option that public-sector employers have been able to offer since the 1980s as a means for cutting costs. Labor advocates say that voluntary comp time works in the public sector because, unlike the private sector, more workers are in unions and there's no profit motive to coerce workers.
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