[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 36 (Wednesday, March 19, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1162-H1163]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        COMPTIME/CHUMPTIME BILL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Georgia [Ms. McKinney] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. McKINNEY. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to come to the floor this evening 
because I wanted to talk about the bill that we just passed here, H.R. 
1, the comptime bill, flexibility time bill, what the gentlewoman from 
California [Ms. Woolsey] called the chumptime bill.
  I would first like to commend CBS Evening News for their March 18 Eye 
on America story reported by Sandra

[[Page H1163]]

Hughes. I called CBS and requested a transcript because I want to read 
that transcript now.
  The opening shot, for those who did not see it, was a door opening 
and a woman by the name of Etta and her family walking out, and a 
narrator says: ``Just after dawn, just east of Charleston, the daily 
struggle begins for Etta Williams.'' And Etta sees her kids off to 
school, and a narrator says: ``Even though she was working up to 60 
hours a week as a cook at the local Pizza Hut, Etta says she had to go 
on food stamps to feed her family because her manager was not paying 
her for all the hours she worked.''
  Etta says: ``They go in, they take your hours, they delete it from 
your pay.''
  The narrator says: ``This minimum wage mom has joined a dozen other 
employees suing Pizza Hut saying the company deleted countless hours 
from their weekly paychecks.''
  Etta Williams continues: ``It is stealing from the poor, stealing, 
and they are getting rich off of it.''
  The narrator says that we tried to talk to her manager at Mount 
Pleasant, SC, Pizza Hut, and the employees called the police.
  Then there is a segue to Gregg Dedrick who is a senior vice president 
eloquently situated in a nice plush office, and he says: ``I would say 
it is unfortunate she feels that way. I think we are a fair employer, 
we want to pay people a fair day's pay for the work they do, and we 
have processes in place to resolve those discrepancies.''
  The narrator then says: ``But a former manager at a Pizza Hut in 
Walterboro, SC, told us a far different story. ``Pam Chapman is that 
former manager who says: I have to live with this. The thought of going 
and taking hours actually stealing from the employees.''
  Pam Chapman admitted that every week she entered the computer and 
deleted hours from workers' payroll. Pam Chapman says: `I have been 
through 3 previous managers and every last one of them did the same 
thing.''
  Then CBS concludes the story by saying all of this comes on the heels 
of a CBS news investigation into similar allegations at Albertson's 
grocery stores. In that report which was played as a recent Senate 
hearing on overtime workers in four States who are suing the grocery 
store chain claimed they were cheated out of millions of dollars in 
back pay.

                              {time}  1815

  Jenni Perry was a bookkeeper. Jenni says, ``I was told by my store 
director to change, falsify, whatever you want to call it, time 
cards.''
  Then CBS goes on to say, ``We wondered just how common these kinds of 
wage complaints are, so we asked the United States Department of Labor. 
They sent us this, and it was a great big, huge book, a printout, 
really, about this thick. Last year alone, more than 12,000 companies 
were fined a total of $100 million for not paying employees for all the 
hours they worked.''
  Etta Williams ends by saying, ``It is not only stealing from me, they 
are taking away from my children too,'' which is why Etta Williams 
decided, in order to protect her family, she was going to have to stand 
up for herself.
  Now, the bill that we passed today has very real implications for the 
millions of Etta Williamses that are out there across this country, and 
for the benefit of my constituents, I want to make it clear to them 
what this is about.
  This bill is not family legislation and it needs to be vetoed by the 
President.

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