2 Measures Compete on Comp Time Issues

WASHINGTON — Families across the nation will be serving underdone eggs and overdone toast to Mom in bed today. But on Capitol Hill, Republicans say they are readying a more welcome Mother’s Day treat for the nation’s working women: new flexibility at the job.

The proposed Family Friendly Workplace Act would allow private-sector employers to offer their hourly workers a choice between paid time off or overtime pay as compensation for extra hours put in at work. Its Republican sponsors call it a common-sense answer to the pleas of families in which both parents work outside the home. They point to polls showing that three out of four employed women say they want the option of taking time off instead of more take-home pay.

“The Republican Congress will help hard-pressed families in a very simple way--we can give them more time together as a family,” Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee said Saturday in the Republicans’ weekly radio address.

Frist said pressures on families stemming from longer parental workdays contribute to increasing crime and drug use by children.

“The American family is our children’s grounding. But more and more, our kids are finding that ground slipping out from underneath them,” Frist said.

Critics Warn of ‘Mother’s Day Hoax’

But critics of the legislation, which was passed by the House in March and is due for a Senate vote early this week, charge that the measure is the boldest assault on basic worker protections in decades. The bill’s sponsors, they say, are ready to serve employers a sumptuous breakfast in bed, leaving working families with the burnt toast and dirty kitchen to clean up.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) calls the bill “a Mother’s Day hoax, not a Mother’s Day gift.”

The White House, which has countered with its own flex-time proposal, is issuing veiled threats of a presidential veto if the GOP bill reaches President Clinton’s desk in its current form. Republicans, in turn, are warning Clinton that it would be a mistake to block a bill that, by most appearances, delivers on his campaign rhetoric of government helping families.

“He said in his campaign he wanted parents to have more time with their children and more flexibility,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), one of the principal Senate sponsors of the legislation. “We’ve taken his ideas, and I think we’ve produced something that’s his basic idea but with an improvement. I think he’d have a hard time explaining why he didn’t want flex-time that’s paid.”

Republicans, however, do not appear to have the necessary votes to override a presidential veto.

With such exchanges of bluster, the legislation has emerged as the most divisive labor issue confronting the 105th Congress. It pits the White House, Democrats, organized labor and other defenders of traditional workplace protections against Republicans, who say the time has come to bring a 1938 labor law into the 1990s.

Today, 70% of mothers with children younger than 18 are in the paid work force. When the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act was enacted, fewer than 20% of mothers worked outside the home.

For One Mother, No Fear of Abuse

In the middle of this political food fight are workers like Patti Mente and Regina Jones, mothers whose work experiences lead them to very different conclusions about the possibilities and perils of the new legislation.

Mente, a mother of three and a secretary at one of the nation’s largest aerospace companies, thinks it makes sense to pass a law that would let her leave a little early to pick up her 1-year-old at day care and make up the time somewhere else. And she has no fear that her bosses would abuse it.

“Our supervisors are very easy around here. You put in your time, and they’re happy,” said Mente, who works at the Dominguez Hills facility of TRW, a company that regularly makes Working Mother magazine’s list of top 100 firms for working mothers. “There’s no one checking over your shoulder.”

Concern That Boss’ Needs Would Prevail

But Jones, a mother of two and until recently the aspiring manager of a fast-food restaurant, has deeper doubts. After three years of working near minimum wage at a Taco Bell in the logging town of Aberdeen, Wash., she was one of a group of plaintiffs who successfully sued the company for systematic violations of overtime laws. For several months, Jones regularly worked 70 to 80 hours a week and was never paid for more than 40.

A high school dropout who was struggling to help support a 5-year-old son, Jones doesn’t think much of a bill that might let supervisors like the ones she worked for at Taco Bell negotiate an alternative to overtime with an employee. Given the choice, said Jones, such employers will offer a worker whatever suits the needs of the boss, not what fits the needs of the worker. As for the claim that such employers are motivated to accommodate their employees’ family needs, she simply scoffs.

“All they care about, in my opinion, is thoroughly lining their own pockets, and forget about the little guy down below,” Jones said. “The power was definitely in the employer’s hands. We couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

That, according to most Democrats and labor leaders, is one of the fundamental problems with the Republican bill: It strengthens the hand of employers and gives workers few protections against bosses who favor employees willing to take time off over those demanding overtime pay.

Such a practice presumably would help employers cut labor costs. That is the principal reason the measure has enthusiastic backing from business organizations, according to its critics. But for families who rely on overtime wages to make ends meet, such a law could amount to a mandated pay cut, and there’s nothing family friendly about that, say the bill’s opponents.

Critics also warn that the measure would allow employers a virtual veto over a worker’s choice of when he or she takes time off. That hardly helps working parents who face demands both predictable and unpredictable: a sick child, a long-scheduled school play, an unexpected berth in a soccer championship.

“The people I worked under, you basically had no choice. It was their way or the highway,” said Tara Weisser, a 23-year-old Taco Bell worker who said she was denied at least 80 hours of overtime pay.

Weisser’s assessment of a law that would give her employer the legal right to negotiate the form of overtime compensation she received?

“It’s a great idea in theory,” she said. “But it just would not work.”

The White House’s alternative proposal tries to protect workers from such abuses, but some of its provisions may not be universally popular. It would allow workers to “bank” only 80 hours of comp time, at a rate of 1 1/2 hours for every hour of overtime worked, that can be taken as paid time off each year.

Beyond that, the White House proposal allows workers to take up to 24 hours of unpaid leave yearly to carry out a variety of family-related obligations, ranging from school activities to scheduled medical appointments. At the same time, it limits the circumstances under which an employer can deny a worker the opportunity to use comp time at the employee’s time of choice.

The bill on the Senate floor this week would allow employees to rack up as much as 240 hours of comp time in a year, plus 50 hours of “straight time,” meaning an hour of paid time off for every hour of overtime work.

Democrats see such limits as important protections for workers. But Republicans see the White House proposal as a measure that leaves workers mainly with the unpalatable option of taking unpaid time off.

Such differences of opinion underscore the deep and perhaps unbridgeable gaps that separate the Republican bill from any measure that would win backing from the White House and its allies on Capitol Hill and in organized labor.

Worker Exploitation Is Key Issue

What appears to separate them are a pair of fundamental questions: How much good faith should one assume on the part of employers in changing labor law? And what are the minimum standards one should enforce--including standards that limit some workers’ options--in the interests of protecting workers from abusive employers?

“I don’t understand this 1920s mentality that always says an employer is going to exploit an employee,” Hutchison said in an interview. “That’s the whole presumption of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was drafted in a different era.”

The Senate’s leading opponent of the Republican bill asserts that Hutchison and other bill supporters are missing the point.

“When we draft labor legislation, it’s Congress’ responsibility to protect the most vulnerable employees,” Kennedy said. “By no means do we assume that every workplace environment is a hostile one. But we are protecting those in which the boss is abusive, and are not in any way harming those workplaces where there’s a reasonable and positive relationship between employers and employees.”

Kennedy and others note that two out of three workers who earned overtime last year worked in jobs that pay less than $10 an hour, and thus are particularly vulnerable to coercive employers. And because 60% of the nation’s 10 million workers earning minimum wage are women, Democrats consider them to be at special risk of losing ground if the GOP bill passes.

And there are still plenty of unscrupulous employers out there, say experts in labor law. In 1996, the Labor Department ordered $100 million in back pay for more than 170,000 workers who had been wrongfully denied overtime. According to one employment research group that supports the legislation, American workers fail to receive an estimated $19 billion a year in overtime pay due them.

Representatives for business groups ranging from the National Assn. of Manufacturers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say they resent the implication that they have anything but their workers’ best interests at heart. But they acknowledge that indirectly, at least, their own interests are at stake. And they are lobbying fiercely for passage of the Senate bill.

“The business community recognizes that the single most important asset is their employees,” said Bruce Josten, vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. “A happy work force is a much more productive work force, and providing flexibility in scheduling are efforts to address such concerns.”