WASHINGTON — House Republicans took up a bill Tuesday to allow companies to offer employees compensatory time rather than time-and-a-half pay, an overhaul of New Deal-era employment law that supporters say would enhance workers’ scheduling options but opponents warn would erode protections.
“This bill would ensure workers have less time, less flexibility, and less money,’’ Maryland Democratic congressman Anthony Brown said in a floor speech opposing the proposal.
Republicans’ control of the White House and both chambers of Congress gives the comp time proposal — which passed the House in 1996, 1997, and 2013, only to fail to get through the Senate — its best chance in years of becoming law. It was approved April 26 by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on a party-line vote.
The legislation is likely to again face hurdles in the Senate. Majority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican whose office declined to comment, hasn’t indicated whether he plans to take up the measure.
If he does, it’s likely to face opposition from Democrats. Republicans, who hold 52 Senate seats, would need the support of eight Democrats to overcome a filibuster if all Republicans support the measure. Otherwise, the bill would stall once again in the Senate.
Under current law, eligible private-sector employees must be paid at least time-and-a-half for any hours beyond 40 that they work in a week. Under the Republican proposal, companies and individual employees could agree that their overtime work would instead be rewarded with comp time.
In lieu of getting paid any wages right away for their extra hours in a week, employees would instead accrue an hour and a half in a comp time bank for each extra hour they worked, which they could then request to use at a future date as paid time off. The House bill has a “sunset’’ provision that would make it expire five years after enactment unless a future law extended it.
Supporters say the proposal would help workers take care of children or aging parents without forfeiting their pay.
“If you asked any working parent, they’d tell you how valuable their time is,’’ said the bill’s sponsor, Representative Martha Roby, an Alabama Republican.
Republicans say the bill has plenty of worker protections, including a ban on coercing employees into choosing comp time and a guarantee that they be paid for any unused comp time within 13 months after accruing it.
That doesn’t satisfy opponents, who see the bill as a Trojan horse that undermines existing protections for workers without creating any new ones.
“It’s a complete and total fraud,’’ said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Nothing under current law prevents companies from offering paid sick days or family leave to their workers, opponents of the proposal say — or short of that, from granting requests for unpaid leave. Because workers right now could take paid overtime and then use the money to make up for unpaid leave taken later, they argue, there’s no benefit in letting them instead work unpaid overtime and then make up for it by taking paid leave.
