[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 112 (Friday, July 26, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H8561]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    WORKING FAMILIES FLEXIBILITY ACT

  (Mrs. SCHROEDER asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Mrs. SCHROEDER. Mr. Speaker, America's working families are under 
tremendous stress. The average working family feels like a hamster in a 
wheel, where they run faster and faster every year and their tongues 
are hanging out and they cannot make ends meet. And so the Republicans 
who were against flex time, were against family medical leave, were 
against everything else, have come up with this new warm fuzzy. It 
sounds wonderful.
  They are talking about the Working Families Flexibility Act. Well, it 
is so flexible that a working woman who works 47.5 hours a week at $5 
an hour takes a 22-percent pay cut. This is not what we need. It is 
wrong to try and trick America's families, who are under such stress, 
that you are trying to be so sympathetic toward them, when all you are 
really doing is giving their employers even more money and even more 
authority over the time and the hours that they work. This is wrong. It 
should be defeated.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope everybody listens to it, and I hope we stop 
putting the kind of nice warm fuzzy names out over something that is 
really going to harm America's families. They are too precious to do 
that.

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