[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 46 (Thursday, April 17, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3310-S3312]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           CONFLICTING VALUES

  Mr. ASHCROFT. I appreciate the opportunity to spend a few moments 
speaking about two of America's values. They are values that are 
embraced by people across our Nation from sea to shining sea, but 
sometimes those values come into conflict. When they come into 
conflict, how we resolve that particular conflict will depend on how 
well we succeed in the next century, how capable we are of carrying on 
at the high level of performance that America has always expected and 
that the world has always admired.
  I speak about two values, and I do not think there are two values 
that are more highly or intensely admired in America than these. The 
first one is the value we place on our families. We understand that 
more than anything else the family is an institution where important 
things are learned, not just knowledge imparted but wisdom is obtained 
and understood in a family which teaches us not just how to do 
something but teaches us how to live.
  A second value which is a strong value in America and reflects our 
heritage is the value of work. Americans admire and respect work. We 
are a culture that says if you work well, you should be paid well. If 
you have merit, you should be rewarded. If you take risks and succeed, 
that is the engine that drives America forward.
  When you have this value of family and the value of work both 
motivating a society, it is good news for the culture and I think 
America has a bright future. But sometimes these values collide. When 
the demands of work somehow get so intense that they impair our ability 
to do with our families what we ought to do, then we feel tension 
because we have these two important components of the American 
character that are bumping into each other.
  Most of us as Americans know that we are working hard enough now that 
there are many times when we simply feel we are not spending the time 
we ought to with our families. If you will look at the data that has 
been assembled by the pollsters and everyone else who takes the 
temperature of the American public regularly, you will find out that 
most Americans would like to be able to spend more time with their 
families, and that most Americans are spending far less time with their 
families than they used to, and that most Americans are spending more 
time on the job than they used to. The number of hours we are devoting 
to our enterprises and our work is going up, and we feel a tension with 
the way in which we value our families. Sometimes we feel like we have 
been sacrificing our families.

  So one of the things that faces us as a culture, as a community, as a 
country is, how are we going to resolve these tensions? I think that is 
one of the jobs, that we have to try and make sure we build a framework 
where people can resolve those tensions and where Government somehow 
does not have rules or interference that keeps people from resolving 
those tensions.
  For example, there are a lot of times when an individual would say on 
Friday afternoon to his boss or her boss, ``My daughter is getting an 
award at the high school assembly today. Can I have an extended lunch 
hour, maybe just 1 hour so that I can see my daughter get the award? I 
would like to reinforce, I would like to give her an `atta girl,' I 
would like to hug her and say, `You did a great job, this is the way 
you ought to work and conduct yourself, it is going to mean a lot to 
yourself and our family and our country if you keep it up.' ''
  Right now, it is illegal for the boss to say, ``I will let you take 
an hour on Friday and you can make it up on Monday,'' because it is in 
a different 40-hour week. You cannot trade 1 hour for 1 hour from one 
week to the next. That will make one week a 41-hour week and will go 
into overtime calculation.

[[Page S3311]]

 Since most bosses do not want to be involved in overtime, it just does 
not happen.
  What we have is a situation where parents are in a bind. They want to 
deal with their family, they want to deal with them effectively. Lots 
of employers would like to help the parent do that, but here is the 
Government standing and saying, ``That's illegal.''
  One of the reasons the Government says that is illegal is because we 
crafted our labor laws about what can be done and what cannot be done 
back in the 1930's. A lot of us cannot even remember the 1930's, but 
they were tough times. We did not have the commitment to flexibility in 
the 1930's that we have now. We thought the 40-hour week was something 
that had to be rigid. Only one out of six mothers of school-age 
children was in the work force in the 1930's--one out of six. That is 
about 18 percent. Now we have between 70 and 80 percent of the mothers 
of school-age children in the work force.
  As a result, we live in a different culture. We live in an entirely 
different world, and these individuals, mothers and fathers, are 
feeling the stress of not being able to have an ability to accommodate 
the needs of the family and also pursue the value of work, which we 
valued so highly and reflected in this body last year when we had 
welfare reform. We said, ``You don't get welfare if you are not willing 
to go to work,'' and we want to value work. But we want to have a way 
so when we have work as being a primary focus of this culture, it also 
allows us the flexibility to do well with our families because we 
understand that it is in families that people build the habits of 
success, that will ultimately carry ourself and our communities.
  This tension between the workplace and the home place, juxtaposed or 
set in a framework of laws created in the 1930's that does not allow us 
flexibility, is a problem. For example, you might be asked to do 
overtime over and over and over again, and you do overtime, and then 
you are paid time and a half for your overtime. But at some point, most 
Americans come to the conclusion, my goodness, no matter how much pay I 
get, I still need some time, and I would like to take some time off, 
instead of getting time and a half in pay. I think it might be a good 
idea to say, if you want time and a half off some week in the future so 
you can spend time with your kids and make up for lost time, or go on a 
vacation or go to a parent-teacher conference, you might be able to say 
to your employer, ``Instead of paying me time and a half in wages, you 
ought to let me take time and a half off sometime.'' If the employer 
agreed to it voluntarily--both parties--we ought to let that happen. It 
is against the law. The law passed in the 1930's, when we were more 
rigid and had different conditions in this country, says if you work 
overtime, you must be paid time and a half; you cannot take comp time 
or compensatory time off.
  Some employers even want to go so far as to help their families by 
saying instead of doing 1 week for 40 hours, we would be willing, if 
you wanted to and on a voluntary basis, let the worker average 40 hours 
over a 2-week period regularly, so you would only work 9 days in the 2 
weeks, but you would work 45 hours the first week and 35 hours the 
second week and have every other Friday off so you could take the kids 
to the dentist or drop by the department of motor vehicles and get the 
car licensed or visit the governmental offices that are not open on 
Saturday. It is against the law to do that now.
  What I have described are three problems: One, the comp time problem 
that you can only get comp time in money not in time; two, flextime; 
sometimes you need to trade 1 hour one week for another hour the next 
week; and three, to schedule flexibly so you might be on a regular 
schedule that allowed you to take time off with regularity.

  All three of these things are available in the Federal Government and 
for governmental entities. Since 1978, the Federal Government has said 
it is OK to swap comp time off instead of overtime pay. The Federal 
Government said it is OK to have a flextime bank so if you need to take 
time off you can take some time off if you put some extra hours in the 
bank. It is also said if you want to have some flexible scheduling so 
that every other Friday or every other Monday is off, that is something 
we can work with you on.
  It is totally voluntary--voluntary for the worker, it is voluntary 
for the Federal Government employer or administrator. Neither can force 
the other because we do not want to force people to work overtime or 
take comp time, but we want to allow Americans to make choices which 
will help them resolve the tensions between the home place and the 
workplace, these two values that are in competition.
  I tell you, it has worked so well in the Federal Government that it 
is almost unbelievable. When the General Accounting Office did one of 
its surveys, and the only survey really that has been done on the 
subject, 76 percent of the workers said they liked it. Only 7 percent 
said they did not like it. That is better than a 10-to-1 ratio. 
Frankly, you cannot interview people in Washington and get that much 
agreement on the fact that today is Thursday. That is an overwhelming 
endorsement, and I think it is high time that we gave to the American 
public generally what governmental workers have had for almost 20 years 
now, 19\1/2\ years. Since 1978, Federal workers have had this ability 
to say on a voluntary basis, ``I would like to take some time off 
instead of getting the overtime pay,'' and the time off would come at 
time and a half. Or, ``I would like to work an extra hour this week so 
I can take an hour off next week and put it in a flextime bank.'' Or, 
if the worker and employer could agree, ``I sure would like to schedule 
it so I work 9 hours a day for 5 days this week and only work 35 hours 
next week so I can take off all of Friday, every other Friday.''
  These potentials, which exist for Federal workers, it occurs to me, 
ought to be able to be available to workers in the private sector as 
well, were we not to be locked into the hard and fast rules of the 
1930's. That was a time when Henry Ford said, ``You can have your Ford 
any color you want so long as it is black.'' Things were not quite as 
flexible then as they are now, and families did not need the 
flexibility then as they do now. With 70 to 80 percent of all mothers 
of school-age children now working and two parents working in all those 
settings, and the tension between work and home, I think we ought to 
have more flexibility at the option of both the employer and the 
worker, only when it is agreed to.
  That is really the subject of the Family Friendly Workplace Act which 
I proposed this year and I believe we will be working on and actually 
voting on in the next 30 days. It is a way of saying we need to allow 
families to work out the conflict that exists between these important 
values that are crucial and so fundamental to the success of this 
culture in the next century, not just fundamental to the success of our 
culture, but fundamental to the success of our own families.
  We were aware when we put this bill together that we did not want to 
allow any employer to be overbearing or coercive, either directly or 
indirectly, in this respect, so we put in tough penalties. We doubled 
the penalties that would attend any violation of overtime rules. Not 
only that, if a worker says, ``I think I would like to have time off at 
time-and-a-half rates instead of being paid time and a half,'' and then 
the worker changes his or her mind, of course, before taking the time 
off, the worker would have the right to cash the time in at any time. 
The law provides that if at the end of the year the worker has not 
taken the time off, the employer has to pay time and a half anyhow. It 
is designed to make sure there is no coercion and voluntary for both 
workers and employers, but it is designed as well to be flexible.
  Some people thought having family and medical leave would be the 
answer. There is a law that says you can take time off to meet your 
family's needs, but you have to take it off without pay. I think that 
really is a tough situation, because the workers are put in a 
circumstance where, in order to relieve the family tension, he or she 
has to increase the financial tension. Well, the financial tension is 
what has driven people into the workplace in the first instance.
  I believe we should not have to take a pay cut in order to be a good 
mom or dad in America. If we would allow for flexible working 
arrangements, a worker could have a bank of time they have earned in 
advance that they could use as flextime or they could take some of

[[Page S3312]]

the time in your bank that you put in at time and a half for comp time 
and you could meet your family needs that way without taking a pay cut. 
Simply, the Family and Medical Leave Act says you can leave without 
pay. I think we ought to have the Family Friendly Workplace Act which 
says you do not have to take a pay cut in order to be a good mom or dad 
in America.
  Well, this is the situation. I believe if you ask people, they will 
tell you they need this. President Clinton commissioned a study by the 
Labor Department. The report was entitled ``Working Women Count,'' and 
that report, headed by the Clinton Labor Department, said the No. 1 
thing we want is more ability to harmonize, to accommodate the needs of 
our families and workers. The President himself has recognized this. 
There was a small portion of Federal Government workers that have not 
been covered since 1978, and when he took office in the early nineties, 
he said, ``I'll cover them,'' and he issued an Executive order which 
extended the benefits to these workers.

  I think it is time for America to prepare for the next century, and 
perhaps it may be a little scary for some people to just loosen their 
grip a little bit on the 1930's, but we do not live that way anymore. 
The truth of the matter is, we need flexibility. As long as we have a 
framework of protections and we guard against abuse and we make it 
voluntary for both employers and employees, I think it is time we said 
to the American people generally, you can have the same benefits that 
the Federal Government employees have had since 1978, you can work to 
accommodate these competing needs that tug and pull you, the need to 
have a good work situation and the need to meet the needs of your 
family.
  When we address these issues on the floor of the Senate, I hope we 
will have an overwhelming vote that sends the American work force into 
the next century with a sense of optimism and a sense of being able to 
accommodate these competing values, values of their families and home 
place and values of industry and the workplace.
  Mr. President, I thank you very much.
  Mr. KYL addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, first let me compliment the Senator from 
Missouri. I have supported his efforts and continue to do so because of 
the important contribution that his legislation would make for 
flexibility for working families in this country. It is an important 
effort that I hope we can succeed in adopting before too long in the 
Senate of the United States. Again, I compliment him.

                          ____________________