My wife received a message distributed via a listserv for job-hunters that was quite alarming. “Your overtime pay under attack!” it screamed. It’s always fun to see what the socialists liberals are upset about, and the Family Time Flexibility Act (HR 1119) is no exception.

What does the law really do?

If the bill becomes law, an employee working 60 hours in one week could choose to be paid for 20 hours at time-and-a-half, or receive that time-and-a-half in hours off, that is, 30 hours of paid leave.

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Notice that it is the worker who chooses overtime pay or comp time.

One of the hysterical UAW claims:

It is not necessary. The current FLSA allows plenty of flexibility. For example, nothing prevents an employer from permitting a worker to work four hours of overtime this week, receiving time-and-a-half pay, and then to allow the worker to take four hour off without pay the following week.

Let’s work through this scenario. Say the worker makes $20/hr. Using UAW logic, the worker works four hours overtime and gets $120. Said worker takes four hours off next week, for which the worker gets nothing. Under the new guidelines, the worker works four hours overtime but doesn’t get paid anything. The next week the worker gets six hours of comp time (time and a half, remember?) and gets paid regular pay, netting $120. Seems to me that the worker is ahead two hours with the family.

Another claim that the opponents make is that “millions of people who depend on overtime pay could be pushed into exempt categories”. (Ignoring the fact that millions of the lowest wage earners would become eligible for the first time.) The solution? Why, guaranteeing overtime pay to anyone that makes less than $100,000. Wait a minute — anyone who makes more than $92,000 is in the top 10% of wage earners in the country. Heck, anyone that makes more than $55,000 is in the top 25%. These people are rich! Why protect them? As any good socialist will tell you, we need to make them earn less and pay more taxes! In 2000, the top 25% of wage earners only paid 84% of the income taxes.

Another concern is that employers will press workers to take the comp time (thus allowing the business to manage the labor resource more efficiently, leading to higher profits, leading to expansion, leading to more hirings and the possibility for promotion from within, meaning more money for the worker – oops, sorry – I seem to have gone off track), rather than the cash. So supervisors would pick employees willing to accept comp time for the overtime, leaving others out in the cold.

News flash! Employers choose who they want to work overtime anyway! Why is this such a disaster? If there’s enough work to go around then everyone works overtime. If only some are needed, only some will work.

Yet another concern (same source as above) is that employers could go out of business, leaving time owed to workers. First of all, under the wording of the legislation, any employee worried that the company is about to go belly-up can opt out of the comp time program and request cash for any time already accrued. This must be paid within 30 days. Second, companies go out of business owing pay and vacation all the time. At the time of this writing, a quick scan down F’d Company showed two companies closing shop, both owing employees the last two weeks of pay.

Opponents say that this is divided along party lines, yet President Clinton supported this legislation in his 1997 State of the Union address:

To prepare America for the 21st century, we must build stronger families. Over the past four years, the Family and Medical Leave law has helped millions of Americans to take time off to be with their families. With new pressures on people in the way they work and live, I believe we must expand family leave so that workers can take time off for teacher conferences and a child’s medical checkup. We should pass flex-time, so workers can choose to be paid for overtime in income or trade it in for time off to be with their families.

Now I will agree with the AFL-CIO (shudder) that the Senate version is not worker-friendly.

The Senate bill proposes calculating overtime and comp time rights on the basis of 80 hours worked over a two-week period rather than the traditional 40-hour workweek. Under that proposal, for example, an employee might be required to work 60 hours one week and, as long as his or her total hours were kept under 20 the next week, the employer would not owe overtime pay rates for what currently would be considered overtime hours during the first week.

To which I say that we should scrap the whole 5 day work week altogether. (Now stay up with me on this one.) I propose a nine day week, of which six are work days so that you would have a 48 hour work work with three days off every week. The great part is that factories and business could rotate workers for maximum productivity. [Full disclosure: I read this somewhere a lifetime ago as a kid, but I'm sure it wasn't here.]

For instance, Joe goes to work days 1 through 6. He takes a machine or a desk or a spot on the assembly line. Jane works days 4 through 9, and takes a different spot or desk or whatever. Bob works 7 though 9 of one week and 1 through 3 the next (his days off are in the middle of the week). So when Joe doesn’t show up to work on day 7 but Bob takes his spot for three days. The next week Joe shows up and takes Jane’s spot, because she’s on her days off. Or perhaps he goes back to his spot and Bob moves over to Jane’s spot. The point is, business never stops and three people are only using two people’s space! If Joe and Jane are married, one of them can be home with the kids six days out of the week. Once the kids are older, they get on the same shift and spend more time together.

The nine day week would be applied to schools, government services, everything. Just imagine, no matter what day of the week it is you can always get stamps or access your safe-deposit box. The mail never stops. Of course, orthodox Jews may have a wee problem. Oy! (On the other hand, the Orthodox Union is being blasted for supporting this legislation!)