• Overtime Overtime When the U.S. House and Senate agree on something in a proposed piece of legislation, you’d think it would end up in a bill sent to the president. Not so when it comes to a measure to
• Overtime
Overtime
When the U.S. House and Senate agree on something in a proposed piece of legislation, you’d think it would end up in a bill sent to the president.
Not so when it comes to a measure to protect ordinary workers’ overtime wages. When corporate campaign contributors get in a lather, the Bush White House will snap its fingers and the offending items vanish into the hot air on Capitol Hill. That’s what’s likely to happen to efforts to save overtime pay for about 8 million Americans.
At issue is the Labor Department’s plan to rewrite the rules on who must be paid overtime for working more than 40 hours a week. The Bush administration wants to snatch OT away from millions of lower-level white-collar workers. Out goes the extra pay for paralegals, emergency medical technicians, licensed practical nurses, surveyors, lab technicians, newspaper reporters, and many police and firefighters. Put them on salary and their bosses can work them long hours without extra pay.
And we’re not talking about people with big salaries: A food preparation supervisor (aka cook) averages $11.90 an hour in St. Louis, according to a 2001 federal survey. Experienced cooks could be reclassified as “chefs,” labeled professionals and denied OT pay.
In September, the Senate voted 54-45 to block the proposed rules with language inserted in this year’s bloated $820 billion pork barrel appropriations bill. At first, the House refused to do the same. Then members got an earful from their constituents and changed sides. The House voted 221 to 203 to go along with the Senate.
The bill went to conference committee, where disagreements get smoothed out. So how does an area of full agreement get zapped? A White House squeeze. President George W. Bush last summer threatened to veto the entire appropriations bill if it retained workers’ overtime. He leaned on the conference committee – dominated by Republicans – to cut the working stiffs’ paychecks.
The House passed the final appropriations bill Monday. Hope now lies with the Senate, which is expected to take it up in late January. Here we have a porcine monster of a bill, larded with wasteful spending, which fails to protect ordinary Americans’ paychecks. It’s ripe for a filibuster in the Senate, where it takes 41 votes to block the bill. Surely there are 41 senators with enough gumption to stand up for their hard-working fellow Americans and force a compromise.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
