DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED
AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004
AMENDMENT 1580
Mr. HARKIN. Thank you, Mr. President. The first vote will be on overtime. I think it has been thoroughly debated. I think Senators know what we are voting on in this amendment. I wish to make a few comments to bring us up to the point of voting on this amendment.
Again, I do not see this in any way as any kind of a partisan vote. It should not be. This affects workers no matter whether they are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or whatever. It does not make any difference. This crosses all party lines.
What has happened, through the Department of Labor, is they came out with these proposed changes in overtime rules and regulations. No hearings were held, and now they say they do not have to have hearings. The law does not mandate that they have to have hearings, but one would think on a major issue such as this they would have gone out to the public and they would have worked with Congress to reach some reasonable agreement on modifying and updating Fair Labor
Standards Act regulations. But, no, they came out with these changes in a very heavyhanded manner.
If one reads the proposed rules and regulations, they really do wipe away the overtime pay protections for I don't knowthe figures are all over8 million, 10 million, 6 million. I don't know what the proper number is, but I can tell you it wipes out overtime pay protection for millions of Americans who have it right now.
My amendment basically says no money can be expended to further promulgate, publish, or enact these rules and regulations.
That does not mean the Department of Labor cannot come back at some point and say we need to modify these. Maybe we need to throw out some old terms.
As I pointed out, the Fair Labor Standards Act has been modified a dozen times since 1938, but it has always been done sort of in consultation with Congress, in an open fashion. That is the way it ought to be done again, especially with something so sensitive as overtime pay.
So this is our vote in which we can basically say no, we are not going to move ahead with these; we are going to go back to the drawing board. If they want to come up to the Congress, to the appropriate authorizing committees in the House and the Senate, and try to work something out, that is fine and we can do that.
In closing, last week the Senate unanimously passed this resolution by Senator Hatch, expressing the sense of the Senate that October would be National Work and Family Month. The resolution expressed the sense of the Senate that reducing the conflict between work and family life should be a national priority. We passed this last Friday unanimously. Are we today going to vote to say we do not care about what we said; what we are going to do is allow these rules and regulations to go into effect which will take away the overtime pay protection for millions of Americans?
Let's back up what we said last Friday with our votes this morning.
I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.