[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Page 24067]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         MINIMUM PAY PROTECTION

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, we have some good news. The House of 
Representatives just a little while ago passed, by a substantial 
margin, a motion to instruct their conferees to adhere to the Senate's 
position saying that the administration cannot go ahead to implement 
the rules on overtime which would take away overtime pay protection for 
over 8 million Americans. The vote in the House was 221 to 203.
  This is a great victory for American workers today. It sends a very 
clear message to the administration: Don't mess with overtime pay 
protection. Don't take away from American workers the overtime pay 
protection that we have had in the law since 1938. This is a clear and 
unequivocal message from both the House and the Senate.
  I hope the administration has the message. I now call upon the 
Secretary of Labor to forthwith, today, by sundown tomorrow, go ahead 
and extend overtime pay protections to hundreds of thousands of 
Americans on the low-income side of the scale.
  Right now, the low-income threshold is $8,060 a year. Part of the 
proposal the administration sent down would have raised that level to 
$21,100 a year. This is an issue on which we all agree. This is 
something the Secretary of Labor can do today, tomorrow, before the 
week is out. This can be done with a stroke of a pen.
  I call upon the Secretary of Labor to immediately issue a new 
regulation that would raise the low-income threshold from $8,060 to 
$21,100 a year and thus cover many more Americans with overtime pay 
protection.
  What the House has spoken so loudly today is what we did in the 
Senate a few weeks ago. We want to extend overtime pay protection to 
more Americans. We do not want to talk it away.
  Let us move forward together, call upon the Secretary of Labor to 
issue these regulations to raise that threshold. Now the administration 
can take those proposed rules they came out with this spring and put 
them in the fireplace. Get rid of them. Then, if we want to move ahead, 
we can do it in two stages. Raise the threshold right now, and then if 
we need to modify and change some of the overtime regulations to 
reflect more accurately the modern day workplace, let's do it together, 
do it with open public hearings, have our witnesses, and do it in a 
deliberate manner that reflects the will of the American people, not 
under the cover of night, putting out proposed regulations without any 
hearings whatever.
  I stand ready as a member of the Labor Committee, and on both the 
authorizing and appropriations side, to work with the Secretary of 
Labor and others to set up a route by which we can, if we need to, 
change and modify some of the regulations to more accurately meet 
today's workforce. But in no case should we diminish the overtime pay 
protections in the law today for people, in no way. We need to extend 
and raise that threshold immediately. That is what I call upon the 
Secretary of Labor to do.
  It would be a great victory today for American workers who are 
lacking in a lot of good news coming out of Washington these days for 
working families. This is one bit of good news for American working 
families today.
  I yield the floor.

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