WASHINGTON — Minnesota U.S. Rep. John Kline has spent much of the past two weeks as the top salesman for the House GOP’s big legislative push, a bill to allow private employees to take paid vacation rather than cash when they work overtime.
For Kline, the chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, it was a Twin Cities media blitz: there was a Star Tribune op-ed, an appearance on TPT’s "Almanac,"radio hits and rounds of interviews with reporters. Nearly all of it was focused on just one bill: the Working Families Flexibility Act, which is scheduled to get a vote in the House Wednesday.
The bill, as he describes it, is a simple one. When hourly public-sector employees work overtime, they’re able to take paid time off (compensatory time, or comp time) in lieu of overtime pay, if they and their employer agree to it. By law, private sector employees can’t, so the GOP bill just makes it an option.
“It’s very, very useful in some cases where you have families who have planned a vacation with the kids or a mission trip,” Kline said. “It’s not for everybody, but if you don’t want it, you don’t have to take it.”
The GOP says the bill gives employees more control over how they're compensated. But Democrats and labor groups, who are opposed, say current overtime laws protect workers and warn of potential abuse by employers. The Democrats on Kline’s Education and Workforce Committee call the delayed paid time off component of the bill a “non-interest loan to employers from workers.”
Given Democrat opposition (not a single one co-sponsors the bill, and the White House has threatened a veto), the bill’s likely fate is a common one for legislation pushed by the House GOP: It will die without a vote in the Senate.
Part of a Republican messaging effort
Still, it’s been one of the House GOP’s stated priorities since this session began. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor featured the proposal extensively in a February speech outlining the party’s 2014 agenda, one “based on a shared vision of creating the conditions of health, happiness and prosperity for more Americans and their families and to restrain Washington from interfering in those pursuits.”
In that way, the bill is part of a Republican rebranding effort of sorts: Rather than dwelling on deficit reduction packages and fighting with Democrats over taxes (to be sure, something Republicans still plan to do), the party is trying to emphasize it’s focus on helping the American family.
“There is no doubt that we have been looking at the debt crisis, the escalating debt crisis, deficits that are running $1 trillion a year, what we can do to get that under control,” Kline said. “That has consumed a lot of our energy and a lot of our effort as we look for ways to try and balance the budget. … Our energy has been directed there, and less so into some of these other issues.”
Kline: Bill updates compensation laws
Enter, then, the comp time bill.
Republicans have tried variants of this legislation as long as ago as the 1990s, without success. They’re arguing this year that the bill would give families more flexibility to determine what type of overtime compensation is best for them: standard overtime pay, or bankable paid-time-off, up to 160 hours worth a year. Kline said the goal is to update-private sector compensation standards first passed by Congress 75 years ago.
“In 1938, when this was put into law, we had a Great Depression, it was a very different workplace and a very different workforce,” he said. “There are now eight and a half million single parents in the workforce today, where time is more important to them than the extra money.”
Kline said Republicans have built in a series of safeguards meant to protect workers. If employees have banked comp time but want cash instead, for example, employers are required to convert it and pay them. And both employer and employee need to agree to use the comp time system instead of traditional overtime pay, and they can back out at any time.
The Republican-controlled House has enough votes to pass to the bill, at which point, “The story is out there,” Kline said, “and we’ll let those people who oppose it explain why they don’t want to give this right to people in the private sector when its been working for years in the public sector.”
Opponents' position
Those opponents would consist of Democrats and labor unions, who argue the bill is more valuable to employers than it is to workers.
House Democrats have gone as far as to argue that comp time would amount to a zero-interest loan to employers: If a worker choose to bank hours of paid-time-off, the logic goes, the employer keeps that compensation until workers come calling for it. The White House put out a veto notice on Monday, hitting the legislation for what it said were inadequate worker protections in the bill.
“This legislation undermines the existing right to hard-earned overtime pay, on which many working families rely to make ends meet, while misrepresenting itself as a workplace flexibility measure that gives power to employees over their own schedules,” the statement said.
Jamie Gulley, the president of the SEIU’s Minnesota State Council, said the bill threatens the very reasoning behind a 40-hour work week and standing overtime laws: If a company has too much work to fit into normal business hours, the idea of paying time-and-a-half to its employees should encourage the company to hire more workers. If employees bank the overtime as comp time instead, that defeats the purpose, he said.
“There are a lot of ways you could create flexibly for workers, but this is all about flexibility for employers,” Gulley said.
Kline said his aggressive salesmanship of the comp time bill is a public education initiative more than anything else. But as long as Democrats remain opposed, it plays a political purpose, too: He wants voters to like this bill, and remember who blocked it after the GOP gives its blessing.
“We’re going to persist it,” he said. “The American people, the more they hear about it, they’re going to have to start asking their representatives: ‘Why won’t you do this for me? People in the public sector have been able to do this since 1985, why can’t I do it?’ So, we’ll let them answer that question.”