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Health & Fitness

Who voted for the Working Families Flexibility act? That would be Rodney....

The Working Families Flexibility Act - flexible for employers but not working families.

 

Last week a much debated bill made it’s may to the final rung in the House of Representatives, and climbed over it.  The “Working Families Flexibility act”  was passed by vote, mostly along party lines (223 to 204), but faces almost certain doom in the Senate.  If they don’t kill it, the President has announced that he will veto it.  Hourly workers all over the US can breathe a sigh of relief now.

The basic idea of the bill (HR 1406) is to offer employees the option of taking earned overtime as time off, something government workers get now.  That sounds pretty good, until we get into the details.

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Workers could earn an hour and a half off for every hour of overtime they work.  The devil in these details is that the employer gets to say when those hours can be taken.  Hourly workers can also “cash in their hours” at the normal overtime rate, but either they have to give the employer 30 days notice or wait until the end of the year.  It’s getting harder and harder to see the flexibility for "working families" isn’t it?

Most of the outrage against this little bill came from worries that employers would rather have their workers earn time off than overtime pay.  Fears that some employers would tend to favor the workers that went for the time off when handing out overtime, loomed darkly over the discussions.  Earning days off rather than cash, especially when the employer says when you take that time, is a lot like loaning your employer your work for free.  If your employer held your overtime pay to the end of the year or forced you to wait 30 days for it, that would be considered a loan and you’d be right to demand interest.

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There are some protections in the bill.  They specifically prevent an employer from working someone overtime and then firing them with “You’re fired, but first take those days off you’ve earned!”  If they let someone go, employers have to pay up (in 30 days). Hourly workers can also file complaints with the Department of Labor but the bill specifically prohibits that department from enforcement action and doesn’t provide any funds for handling complaints either.  The bill does alloy employees to sue their employers for any coercion to take “off-time” over money, unfortunately lawyers expect cash and probably won’t be interested in trading for some of your “off time.”

The sad part of this bill is that the Republicans who proposed and passed it (the bill had 168 co-sponsors) either don’t understand that overtime pay is mostly spent on day to day needs or actually doing something during what little vacation workers do get, or they don’t get that the time someone has earned to spend with their family probably shouldn’t be completely subject to employer approval.

Maybe that’s not the saddest part.  Maybe the saddest part is that this is part of the new “kinder, friendlier, more compassionate” Republican platform.  Three of the NJ Republican representatives voted against the bill (LoBiondo, Runyan, Smith) but not Rodney Frelinghuysen or Scott Garrett.  They were all Ayes.

Frankly, I guess this is the kind of understanding and compassion what we can expect from lawmakers who are functionally illiterate when it comes to overtime pay.  That’s understandable since 110 of Republican house members are millionaires (76 of the Democrats as well) and they certainly don’t show any sign of working overtime at their jobs.  

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