The House is expected to vote Wednesday on the "Working Families Flexibility Act," a Republican bill which would allow employers to substitute comp time for overtime pay. Supposedly workers would have to agree to the substitution, but, as the Obama administration said in a
veto threat, the bill "does not provide sufficient protections" for workers who want overtime pay rather than time off later—time off that the boss could refuse to allow at the time the worker wanted it.
A letter of opposition from the National Partnership for Women and Families and a long list of other organizations notes that the bill could hurt job creation "because it is cheaper to provide comp time than to pay overtime wages, there is a significant incentive for employers to hire fewer people and rely on overtime hours—paid for in future comp time—to get work done."
In short, the bill's name isn't wrong, exactly, in an Orwellian kind of way. It is about working families and flexibility. It's just that, in typical Republican fashion, the working families are the ones who have to flex to someone else's will, and the employers are the ones who get added power to require others to be flexible and reap the benefits themselves.