House Republicans are planning to consider legislation that would weaken rules requiring businesses to pay their employees overtime when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Instead of allowing workers to make increased wages for working longer, the legislation would give employers the option of providing employees with “comp time,” or more time off from work.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has floated the plan in the past, and now Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) is planning to introduce the bill into Congress, the Huffington Post’s Dave Jamieson reports:
Cast by Republicans as a reform toward workplace flexibility, the proposal would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, a bedrock labor law of the New Deal era, to ostensibly give workers more options in how to use their accrued overtime. [...]
On Tuesday, Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.) told USA Today that she plans to introduce such a bill next week, saying it could “provide some relief in this economy to working families.” The language of the bill is not public yet.
thinkprogress.org
Yeah, "workplace flexibility" . . . that's the ticket. When I think about how my new boss is going to be fucking me out of my overtime pay the term that comes to mind is "flexibility".
More options. Bad options. We used to offer you water, but would you be interested in a little arsenic as a second option?
You get to work more than 40 hours a week, and I will pay you for the first 40 hours, anything after that you won't get paid in money, no no no, maybe something else like time off.
You know, there is a much faster way to get time off instead of working overtime hours past 40 a week in exchange for time off, you could always only work 40 hours that week.
More WTF below the fold . . .
But silly me, proposing that someone would only work forty hours a week would imply that someone could survive in this corporate controlled TBTF plutocratic environment of stagnant wage serfdom on only forty hours a week. Clearly, that is not the case, people gladly work overtime and second jobs if and when they can find them just to survive, so how do we screw people out of their overtime pay too says Mr. Republican? After forty years of stagnant wages and soaring CEO compensation, after bailing out wall street and seeing the stock markets full recovery, and now that corporate profits are at record highs the GOP is going to reward you trickle down style by taking away your overtime pay in exchange for not money.
Let me ask something? . . .
Beyond white male homophobic christianish privilege what does the GOP have to offer? Does the GOP have anything at all to offer non-millionaires other than hate against gays, women, brown people, foreigners, etc, etc, etc?
Are Republican voters so dumb that you can stick the phrase "Family Friendly" into a bill stripping workers of their overtime pay and Republican voters wouldn't notice?
Of course they are that dumb. Mitt Romney knew it, Rick Scott knows it, C Street cultist Mark Sanford knows it, every billionaire and media huckster in their employ knows it.
Well, the GOP does offer you war, guns, cruelty towards those unlike you, apathy, cynicism, and tax cuts for the rich. So there is that.
The same people outraged that Obama might take their guns away at any moment couldn't give a flying fuck that the GOP is planning on stealing their overtime pay, because these deadender dunces are fine with being robbed blind just as long as they get to feel superior to gays, brown people, women and sinners.
So the GOP, led by Eric Cantor, is proposing ending overtime pay for workers. That is a thing now. Because freedom.
Ahhhh, 'Murica
end angry rant