[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 51 (Tuesday, April 20, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4115-S4116]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 PROPOSED FINAL REGULATIONS ON OVERTIME

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, the news reports of this morning are that 
the Department of Labor will shortly publish the final regulations 
regarding changing the overtime rules that have been in existence since 
1938.
  Frankly, given its past track record, the Bush administration is 
simply not trustworthy on this issue. This administration has gone out 
of its way, time and again, to undercut working families' rights to 
time-and-a-half pay for overtime.
  Now, it is possible that the administration has had an election-year 
conversion on overtime, but I hope you will pardon me if I remain a 
little skeptical. I will remain skeptical until I see the regulations 
and have a chance to analyze them and read the fine print. I have asked 
the Department of Labor to provide me with a copy of the regulations 
this morning. I am eager to see them as soon as possible. As of a few 
minutes ago, they still have not been posted on the Department of 
Labor's Web site.
  Let's be clear about one thing: The draft regulations that came out a 
year ago were a radical rewrite of the Nation's overtime rules and a 
frontal assault on the 40-hour workweek. Millions of American workers 
were slated to lose their right to time-and-a-half overtime pay as a 
result of those proposed regulations.
  Since passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, overtime 
rights and the 40-hour workweek have been sacrosanct, respected by 
Presidents of both parties--until now.
  This administration rammed through these new regulations a year ago 
without a single public hearing. It has dismissed public opinion polls 
showing Americans' overwhelming opposition to changes in overtime law. 
The White House brushed aside the will of the Senate and the House, 
both of which voted in support of my amendment last year to block 
implementation of these new rules.

  There is no question the proposed new rules will hurt job creation. 
If employers can more easily deny overtime pay, they will simply push 
their current employees to work longer hours without compensation. With 
9 million Americans currently out of work, why give employers yet 
another disincentive to hire more workers?
  Again, while a limited number of low-income workers technically were 
given the right to overtime pay--and that base was increased--at the 
same time, the Department of Labor also gave employers advice on how to 
avoid paying overtime compensation to the lowest paid workers. So the 
administration gave on the one hand and took it away with the other.
  The Department of Labor is poised to issue its final regulations. But 
I can assure you, this will not be the final act. We will be back. I 
look forward to reading them. We will look over the fine print, as I 
said.
  For example, last year when the proposed regulations came out, it 
took some months before everything came out about how bad these 
proposed regulations really were. So we are going to go over these 
proposed regulations and take a look at them.
  But I know the administration yesterday and in a press report today 
said this is a good deal; they are going to expand the eligibility for 
overtime pay; this is going to include more people. Well, we heard the 
same kind of ``happy talk'' a year ago when they first put out the 
proposed regs. However, public exposure showed the real facts of the 
proposed regulations. Up to 8 million Americans were going to lose 
their right to overtime pay. Again, it is just one in a series of 
assaults on working Americans by this administration.
  Again, if you look at this chart, the red line is what the White 
House forecast for job creation for 2002. The blue line is what they 
forecast in 2003. The purple line is what they forecast for 2004. Here 
is where we really are down here with the green line. So this is 
``happy talk.'' The administration says, oh, they are going to forecast 
more jobs. It is all going to get better. But the facts are not so. Job 
creation has stayed stagnant. So when you hear all this ``happy talk'' 
about how these final new regulations on overtime are going to be so 
wonderful for everyone working in America, take a look at this chart. 
It is just more ``happy talk.''
  We will look them over. But unless this administration has done 
almost a complete revision of what they proposed, we are going to still 
be back on the Senate floor asking that these rules not go into effect, 
and we will have a vote on that.
  Finally, I think an article by Bob Herbert in the New York Times of 
April 5 says it all: ``We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money?'' 
What Mr. Herbert points out in his article is that an awful lot of 
American workers have been had, fleeced and taken to the cleaners, as 
he said. He said:

     . . . there has been no net increase in formal payroll 
     employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs.

  He said: What happened to all the money from the strong economic 
growth? Well, he said:

       The bulk of the gains did not go to workers, ``but instead 
     were used to boost profits . . . or increase C.E.O. 
     compensation.''

  Well, it is the first time on record where the bulk of the increase 
has gone to corporate profits and not to labor.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent this article of April 5 be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 5, 2004]

               We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money?

                            (By Bob Herbert)

       It's like running on a treadmill that keeps increasing its 
     speed. You have to go faster and faster just to stay in 
     place. Or, as a factory worker said many years ago, ``You can 
     work `til you drop dead, but you won't get ahead.''
       American workers have been remarkably productive in recent 
     years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits 
     of this increased productivity. While the economy, as 
     measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for 
     some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than 
     the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an 
     unprecedented share of the cash from this burst of economic 
     growth.
       What is happening is nothing short of historic. The 
     American workers' share of the increase in national income 
     since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the 
     lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is 
     extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, 
     which tells you something about the hold that corporate 
     interests have on the national conversation.
       The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very 
     revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor 
     Market Studies at Northeastern University: ``The 
     Unprecendented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the 
     Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation--Gainers and Losers 
     from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003.''
       Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead authority of the 
     study, said: ``This is the first time we've ever had a case 
     where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a 
     larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. 
     Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits 
     about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and 
     labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including 
     wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes 
     paid by employers] got 38 percent.''
       The study said: ``In no other recovery from a post-World 
     War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as 
     much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at 
     no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater 
     amount than labor compensation.''
       In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been 
     had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners.
       The recent productivity gains have been widely 
     acknowledged. But workers are not being compensated for this. 
     During the past two years, increases in wages and benefits 
     have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the growth 
     of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White 
     House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in 
     formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We 
     have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there 
     were when the recession ended in November 2001.

[[Page S4116]]

       So if employers were not hiring workers, and if they were 
     miserly when it came to increases in wages and benefits for 
     existing employees, what happened to all the money from the 
     strong economic growth
       The study is very clear on this point. The bulk of the 
     gains did not go to workers, ``but instead were used to boost 
     profits, lower prices, or increase C.E.O. compensation.''
       This is a radical transformation of the way the bounty of 
     this country has been distributed since World War II. Workers 
     are being treated more and more like patrons in a rigged 
     casino. They can't win.
       Corporate profits go up. The stock market goes up. 
     Executive compensation skyrockets. But workers, for the most 
     part, remain on the treadmill.
       When you look at corporate profits versus employee 
     compensation in this recovery, and then compare that, as Mr. 
     Sum and his colleagues did, with the eight previous 
     recoveries since World War II, it's like turning a chart 
     upside down.
       The study found that the amount of income growth devoured 
     by corporate profits in this recovery is ``historically 
     unprecendented,'' as is the ``low share . . . accruing to the 
     nation's workers in the form of labor compensation.''
       I have to laugh when the I hear conservatives complaining 
     about class warfare. They know this terrain better than 
     anyone. They launched the war. They're waging it. And they're 
     winning it.

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, again, we will look over these proposed 
regulations. But nothing the administration has done in the last 
couple, 3 years with regard to job creation, with regard to treating 
labor fairly in terms of getting its fair share of any economic gains, 
or the proposed regulations last year that would have literally cut off 
at the knees American workers' right to overtime pay changes my mind; I 
remain skeptical that this administration really wants to help work 
workers get overtime pay.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.

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