John Ashcroft

Mr. ASHCROFT

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, we may or may not be able to have the cloture motion filed this afternoon. But to make a difference in terms of working out some of these measures, I would be pleased to see the cloture motion held over until Tuesday so that the cloture vote could be held until Thursday. I think it is important for us to get together and work on this measure. It is important for us to understand that we agree that families need more time. I believe we have an agreement that we want workers to have a real choice and a choice that is meaningful to workers. That is one of the reasons we put the second level of choice into the bill. We allow a worker to choose to say, ``I would like to have this as comptime instead of overtime pay.'' But we put a second choice into the bill that says any time after the worker has said that they want it as comptime and not as pay later, the worker can say, ``I change my mind. I will take that as pay.'' That is to avoid any potential coercion or abuse. But the idea that an employer might say we are only going to let overtime go to people who will choose compensatory time, or even to say we are only going to let overtime go to employees who are going to choose to be paid because they don't want to mess with the hassle of keeping the overtime--if the employer wants to participate at all, the employer shouldn't be able to intimidate the employee's choice in this matter. One of the things that I think I would like to point out that the Senator from Massachusetts has raised is that he wants this to be something that helps families. He talks about the need to help families. But the kinds of items that they are proposing that deal only with comp time and don't deal with flexible working arrangements like the Federal employees have or don't deal with anything like the Federal employees have, maybe we will address the needs of at best maybe a third of the employees. I think we are forgetting the data from the 1996 current population survey, which indicated that only 4.5 percent-- that is one out of every 25 women--who work by the hour have overtime in a typical workweek. That means, yes, in a typical work period and in a week's time. But say you get four times or five times that 4.5 percent that get it over the course of time so that they would be able to build up some comptime, they are still talking about 20 percent of the women in the culture who are working in those hourly jobs. If you have 28.8 million women working in hourly jobs and you are only going to help 5 to 6 million of them, we have not done much in this bill. We need to address the problems that inure to the families of all of the workers, not just the ones that get regular overtime. The men are in a little bit better shape in our culture. They get more of the overtime than the women do. There are about two men getting overtime for every woman getting overtime. But if we do nothing more than pass the comptime part of this bill, we are going to leave behind too many men and too many women. We need to have flexible working arrangements on a broader level to meet the needs of the families, the families with children, that do not have regular overtime. They get sick. Children in families that do not have regular overtime get awards--they have parent-teacher conferences. Of course, in one respect it is important to say that, if you have comptime or flextime under this bill, you don't even have to have children to benefit. If you want to go fishing and your boss can agree that it does not unduly disrupt the business' purposes, you can swap the time off, and especially if you schedule to take every other Friday off. The Senator from Massachusetts talked about the fact that there are certain ways in which flexible benefits can inure under the current situation. He says that only a tiny fraction of the employers provide flexible work schedules. That is because they are unworkable. It is a simple matter of fact. The flexibility outside of S. 4 is limited to arranging 40 hours of work in a 7-day period. Exchanging hours from week to week is not permitted, even if the employee requests such an arrangement. For example, an employee who wants to work 45 hours in one week in exchange for only working 35 in another in order to attend a child's soccer game or to take the child to a doctor or to go fishing makes the employer agree to pay 5 hours of overtime for the longer workweek. Most employers can't do that. Sally Larson, a human resource professional at TRW, tesified before the Employment and Job Training Subcommittee that her company instituted a program where hourly workers would take every other Friday off. She also stated it took a team of lawyers a year to change over their payroll systems and to make sure that the program complied with Federal law. Most hourly workers aren't working in settings like that where they work for an employer who can have a team of lawyers that go through that kind of enterprise. Small businesses--or any business, for that matter--should not have to hire a team of lawyers in order to cooperate. The point is that current law is unworkable. It is obviously not in broad utilization. It doesn't happen. We need something better. The fact is that the system which we are promoting, the system which we are offering to the American public, is not an untried system. It is a system that has been place in the Federal Government since 1978. Through the last years of the 1970's, all through the decade of the 1980's, now well through the 1990's, we have had the system in place. I have been in the Senate now going on 3 years. I have yet to have a single Federal employee come and complain to me about this system. There is no bill pending in the U.S. Congress that would change this system. This is a benefit. It is a clear, unmistakable benefit. It is something that workers use. They subscribed to the flexible working arrangements benefits so aggressively early on that it has provided some difficulty in getting people to work on Friday. It has taken cooperation and some scheduling. But that has happened. There is much talk about the fact of the suggestion that we are without protections in this bill. But the bill which I have proposed for private industry has many protections which are not included in the bill which relates to the public. What I find amusing is that many of the people who are most aggressive in their opposition to this bill for private industry were sponsors of the bill which does not have the protections for people who work for the Government. Look at this. ``Workers can be required to participate in compensatory time as a condition of employment.'' This goes to the comptime bill for State and local workers. ``Can be required to participate.'' Under my bill it is strictly voluntary, and cannot be required. The very sponsors of the bill which are complaining, saying there is not enough volunteer choice here, cosponsored the bill for State and local employees which allows them to be required to participate as a condition of employment. Under the State and local law, which was sponsored by the same opponents of the bill currently, ``management can decide whether a worker must use comp time.'' Not so. ``Workers cannot be coerced into using their comp time. Penalties are doubled for direct or indirect coercion'' under our bill. It is important that people have choice. If someone were to try to coerce a worker into using comptime, the worker would have to do but one thing: Say, ``I want the money,'' because we allow for that second choice. Until you actually use comptime under S. 4, you have the right to cash that time in at any time. So you want the money? Just say you want the money. This is a structural opportunity. This structural capacity to take the money mitigates against coercion. ``Comptime is paid in cash only when a worker leaves the job.'' Under Senate 1570, Public Law 99-150, you have to quit if you are a State government employee in order to get your pay in cash. We didn't think that was enough protection. We thought that workers ought to have a different protection than that. ``Comptime must be cashed out on the request of the employee,'' and ``must be cashed out at the end of the year.'' I just raise these issues as a means of saying that our effort is to make this measure one which will provide a basis upon which people can spend time with their families, can arrange their work schedules, can meet these competing demands of the workplace and the home place. And we have sought to place not only legal inhibitors to coercion in the bill, we have also sought to put structural things in the bill--the right of the worker to cash out, just to say I want the money; I am entitled to it; give me the time-and-a-half, I want to take my money instead of leaving the hours in the bank. That right is there all the time. It never is extinguished. The only way the right of the worker--there are two ways the right of the worker to get that money out is extinguished. Two ways. The first is if the worker takes time off with pay. You would not expect to take time off with pay and get paid time and a half for overtime. You cannot have your cake and eat it. The second way you do not have a right to cash out your employment is if you are going to get cashed out at the end of every year. At the end of every year the employer must give out the money. He cannot carry it over as comptime. So if the worker cannot be forced to take it as comptime and at the end of the year the employer must give it out as cash, then the employer does not have any real incentive to try to get people to work without, by saying they will take comptime instead of paying them overtime. A business is going to have to hold the cash ready to pay it out at the end of the year, hold it ready to pay it out at the employee's request, at any time the worker says I have decided I want the money instead of cash. As I said to the Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. President, I hope we will be able to work to provide further assurance that we do not intend for employers to be able to coerce or intimidate. This is a measure which I think would really affect people where they live. I have been getting lots of letters from people around the country. This one says: I'm writing this letter in regard to S. 4, the Family Friendly Workplace Act. I ask that you support the bill as I think it would be of great benefit to all the citizens of this country. Time and again parents relate to me-- And this comes from a public school principal-- parents relate to me that they cannot come to school for conferences or other meetings because they have to work. This bill would seem to allow some flexibility in the workplace. The principal knows the value of parents being able to come and participate in the child's education. She also goes on to say: I'm also the child of an elderly parent who needs constant care. Many of my baby boomer friends are in the same situation of caring for parents. A family friendly workplace would relieve some of the worry and frustration of this situation. Thank you for your time. Here is a letter from a 25-year-old single mother of twin 2-year-old daughters--A 25-year-old single mother of twin 2-year-old daughters. Now, this is the definition of having your hands full. Recently I heard of your Family Friendly Workplace Act. My employer, located in Carthage, MO, does not allow a flexible work schedule or overtime. My understanding of this act is that I would be able to have flexibility in my work schedule, giving me the opportunity to make up work hours lost because of illness in the family and doctor appointments. She is right there. The employer would have the option of doing that. As a 25-year-old single mother of twin 2-year-old daughters, the Family Friendly Workplace Act would be extremely beneficial to my situation. Listen to her situation. My children were born with a congenital heart disease and they need to attend checkup appointments on a 3-month basis with a cardiologist. These appointments have to allow a full day since our specialist is in Springfield, MO, and especially because both of my children attend the appointments. Also, since my children have a heart disease, they need special attention if they are ill. As a single mother, it's very difficult to lose any days financially. Let me read that again. As a single mother, it is very difficult to lose any days financially. Let me interrupt this letter for a moment. Now, you might say, well, this woman can take time from Family and Medical Leave. I think she could qualify for the serious medical problems that Family and Medical Leave may cover. But Family and Medical Leave makes you take the time off without pay. So here is this single mother, with twin 2-year-old daughters with congenital heart disease, having to make regular doctor appointments and having to take a pay cut in order to take her kids to the doctor, and she says: My understanding of this act is that I will be able to have the flexibility in my work schedule giving me the opportunity to make up work hours lost because of illness in the family and doctor appointments. I can understand her desire to make those things up. As a single mother-- She goes on to say-- it's very difficult to lose any days financially. The opportunity to make up lost workdays would be incredibly helpful. The Family Friendly Workplace Act would give me the opportunity to take time off from work without the loss of pay because of those days my children are ill or need to attend a doctor's appointment. Thank you for taking time to read my letter and your consideration of the many working parents who would appreciate such an act. Please go forward with the Family Friendly Workplace Act. Absent the Family Friendly Workplace Act, people like that have to take family and medical leave, which is time off without pay. Now, before the current occupant of the Chair came in, I went to the Report of the Commission on Family and Medical Leave. The Commission report stated in order to make up for the pay cuts that people have to endure because they are not allowed to make up their salaries, they are not allowed to bank flextime and they are not allowed to have banked comptime--here is how they make up for those losses--28 percent have to borrow money; over 10 percent went on welfare when they took family and medical leave; 42 percent put off paying bills. Do you know what putting off paying your bills does for you? It increases your payments. The interest goes up. You are paying for a longer period of time. And it just occurs to me that we should not put people in the position of having to take a pay cut in order to be a good mom or dad in America. We should have a situation where we can give people the option of working some time in advance and then using that time, or when they have overtime required of them, putting that time in a bank so they can take time and a half off at some later date. It seems to me that makes a lot of sense. Now, I do not understand how it is that those who oppose this bill say this is a bill for a pay cut. This is not a pay cut. This is a way for you to work time in advance so that when you need to take time off later, you do not have to have a pay cut. You do not have to take Family and Medical Leave time, which is unpaid leave. You can take flextime off or comptime off, or you could just cash in your flextime or comptime and have the money that you had earned earlier there to sustain you when you would be gone. So the suggestion that this is a bill which provides for pay cuts I think ignores the real facts of life. The real fact of life is that when you have your 25-year-old mother, single mother of twins going to the doctor under Family and Medical Leave, she takes a pay cut. And that pay cut is never restored. But if she had the ability to have flexible working arrangements, that would be a pay cut which she would not have to endure. I believe we do have a lot of agreement here. We agree that American families need the opportunity for flexible working arrangements. S. 4 provides the potential of flexible working arrangements to all the workers in the culture. Because the suggestions from the other side only address people who traditionally work overtime, you are only talking about a third of the people in the culture there. I think we ought to find a way to help all Americans balance the needs that they have between their families and the workplace, and we ought to look very carefully at the data from the 1996 Current Population Survey which indicates that only 4.5 percent, 4.5 percent of the private sector working working women report getting regular overtime. Even if you multiply it 4 or 5 times, get it up to 20 percent, get it up to 25 percent, multiply it by seven times or eight times, get it up to 32 percent, you are still ignoring two-thirds of the individuals in that population. I think it is time for us to provide a way to accommodate the needs of families that respects all of the families in the United States of America and does so without requiring them to take a pay cut, because, in my judgment, we should not be asking people to take pay cuts. We should be providing people with ways that they can sustain their income and sustain their families in the same situation. Mr. KENNEDY addressed the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT. I am happy to try to work together with our staffs to see if we can meet a mutual understanding of language. It is not my intent to draft a measure that would allow the employer to withhold the benefit of additional overtime or opportunities from an individual based upon their commitment to take either comptime as opposed to paid time or paid time as opposed to comptime. The decision should be neutral.

Mr. ASHCROFT. This defines intimidation, and it says it includes ``promising to confer or conferring any benefit such as appointment,'' which means to appoint the person to do the overtime, or promotion, or compensation, to give a person a benefit, which the overtime is clearly a benefit. That is the whole thrust of your argument. If you do that, your discrimination qualifies as intimidation under the definition on page 40. But maybe we can clarify this with an amendment. That is one of the reasons I have said I would welcome Members to come to the floor.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. ASHCROFT. Not under the bill.

Mr. ASHCROFT. No, what I am saying----

Mr. ASHCROFT. Page 40--thank you for asking--definition: ``The terms intimidate, threaten or coercion include promising to confer or conferring any benefit, such as an appointment, promotion, or compensation, or affecting or threatening to affect any reprisal such as deprivation of appointment, promotion, or compensation.'' It seems to me that is exactly what you are talking about.

Mr. ASHCROFT. If you mean for the question to be totally rhetorical, I would not. But I believe there are reasons in the bill which indicate that such coercion would not exist. First, I do not think it is automatic that it costs an employer less to have an employee to accept comptime and have to maintain books for the compensatory time and also have the cash available for an employee to be paid the compensatory time at the worker's option. If you look at the bill on page 15, it says, ``Prohibition of Coercion,'' and it says, ``shall not directly or indirectly intimidate, threaten, coerce or attempt to do so,'' and again on page 39, ``an employer shall not directly or indirectly intimidate, threaten, coerce or attempt to do so.''

Mr. ASHCROFT. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, I am pleased to have the opportunity to stand and speak on behalf of the Family Friendly Workplace Act. It is a way of helping people resolve tensions that exist between the home place and the workplace. Most American families encounter two basic tensions. One is the tension that is financial, that drives both adults in the family, if there are two adults in the family, into the workplace; certainly if there is only one adult in the family, that one adult has tremendous pressure to be in the workplace. The other pressure which exists for most American families is the social pressure that comes when you have all of the adults in the family in the workplace. You have tension between the workplace and the home place. How in the world are we going to be able to meet the needs of the home, when people are not at home when they are needed the most-- particularly when there are times when their presence is very, very important. For example, when someone is getting an award, or when someone needs to speak to the counselor or with a teacher at school, or when someone needs to go to the doctor. Most families understand that when you have this kind of a need you should have the opportunity to be away from work. If both adults in the family are involved in the workplace it makes it very tough to do. There are times when certain conditions will justify the use of what is known as family and medical leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act was passed by the U.S. Congress and it allows people to take time off without pay. But I have found in my family, and I am sure most Americans have found as well that when you take your child to the doctor, that is not a time when you can go without pay. That is a time when you actually need all the resources you can get. To put people in the position of having to take a pay cut in order to go see the teacher about a problem at school or to watch the student get an award at school or to be able to take a child to the doctor--to ask a parent to take a pay cut in a setting like that is to make a parent make a choice that we should not be asking a parent to make. Fortunately, there already exists in this culture a clear model of a system that can work, that works effectively and works very well. It is in the Federal Government. Legally, all Federal employees have the ability to have what is called flexible working arrangements. They can take time off with pay later if they have earned that time off by working more hours earlier. They can arrange their schedule to work a couple hours extra one week and take a couple hours off the next week. As a matter of fact, Federal workers have the ability to take advantage of the scheduling option which allows them to work 45 hours one week, 35 hours the next week. That way they have every other Friday off. Of course, that is really a tremendous boon to people who need to be able to do things during the normal working hours, whether it is to go to the motor vehicle registration place to get the car plates renewed or to take a child to a doctor or go see a child get an award or confer with a teacher at the high school--those kinds of days that can be scheduled flexibly for Federal employees have worked well to solve problems for Federal employees. Unfortunately, what is standard operating procedure for people who work for the Federal Government turns out to be outright illegal for people in the private setting. Let me give an example. If you work for a Federal agency and you want to go see your daughter get an award on Monday afternoon next week you can say to the boss this Friday, ``I would like to work a couple extra hours and then I can take off early next Monday.'' Now, your boss can let you work 2 hours this week and you can take the 2 hours off next week, that is fine, you can see your daughter get the award. For a private employer to do that is violating the law. It is against the law for a private employer to be able to cooperate with his or her employee in such a setting. Now that really shocks most of us to think it is against the law for an employer to help an employee in that respect, but it is the truth. Similarly, if the private employer says if you would really like every other Friday off we will let you work 5 days at 9 hours a day, that would be 45 hours one week, and then the next week you only have to work 35 hours and you can do that by working 4 days, take the fifth day off the second week, that private employer, to pay a person the standard wages for doing that, is in violation of the law. Now you might add, ``Gee, this is astounding. That should not be against the law.'' It is against the law in the private sector. It is not against the law for Federal Government employees. What is interesting is when you talk to Federal Government employees, they endorse this system overwhelmingly. The General Accounting Office, which is the Office which makes assessments about how well Government is functioning and what works and what does not work--too often they find out what does not work--they made a study of this particular proposal and the way this works in the Federal Government. It was amazing that at a 10-to-1 ratio, Federal Government employees said this is something that really helps, this is something we like. This is something we want. This works. Not only did the employees say it was something that helped, that they wanted, that worked, the employees also were found by the General Accounting Office to be more productive, their morale was higher, and, obviously, those are the kinds of things we would like to extend all across our economy. Now, private, hourly paid workers in America are deprived of these benefits. It is just that simple. It is against the law. People say, how in the world did we get a law that would make it against the law for an employee and an employer to cooperate in this way? Well, back in the 1930's on the heel of the Great Depression, when only 2 out of every 12 mothers of school-age children were in the work force, a law was created that set up the Fair Labor Standards Act. This act gave some important protections to American workers. However, it also made these kinds of adjustments, this kind of workplace flexibility illegal. The world is so different now than it was then, it is almost impossible to imagine. Instead of 2 out of 12 mothers of school-age children being in the workplace, it is 9 out of 12 mothers of school-age children being in the workplace. So we flipped the statistics totally but we are still operating with the same approach--not totally operating that way. We changed it for Government workers. Of course, Government workers are not the only people that have flexible schedules. The people in the boardrooms have flexible schedules. The boss never seems to have trouble with his salary if he takes time off to play golf, let alone to see a child at school. People on salary, the managers and the supervisors--as a matter of fact, the majority of American citizens--have flexible scheduling. It is estimated about 66 million people have flexible scheduling and only 59 million who are the hourly paid working people of America do not have the ability for flexible schedule. It is no wonder that the Pugh Foundation said that 81 percent of the working mothers said, ``We need flexible working arrangements for the private sector.'' Obviously, that would be a great help to them. It would be a great help, they believed, because they think that is what would help them. When you look at Federal workers who have had this plan--now, for well into the 1970's--the 1980's and the 1990's, they say at a 10 to 1 ratio, ``This is the best thing since sliced bread. This is something that is very important to us.'' So, we are talking about a proposal which would extend to workers and working families the capacity to harmonize these competing demands between the workplace on the one hand and the home place on the other hand. I might add that I believe we are going to continue to have lots of people working outside the home in America. As a matter of fact, I do not know that America could be very competitive in the world economy if we did not. These two-parent families where both parents are working outside the home and the single-parent family where the only parent is working outside of the home are part of the muscle and fiber of the American economy. We cannot do without them. The truth of the matter is we need to find ways to help them harmonize the competing demands. They need more time and more flexibility. What is interesting about the Federal system is that it allows you to earn your time off by earning a little bit at one time and taking it off at another time. These flexible working arrangements give workers the ability to take time off without having to take a pay cut. Now the family and medical leave provisions are good, they are fine, they are part of the law right now, but if you take time off under the family and medical leave provisions you lose pay, and when you lose pay that way it is not only not good for you, it is not good for the country. Let me just talk to you about what happens in the family and medical leave situations where they have taken time off. Now, the family and medical leave Commission stated that the method that hourly employees used to recover lost wages when taking family and medical leave is that 28.1 percent borrowed money. So, families had to go in debt to meet their needs. And 10.4 percent, 1 out of every 10 hourly workers who took time off under family and medical leave had to go on welfare because of the money they lost. 41.9 percent, almost 42 percent, 4 out of every 10 people, deferred paying their bills. Now, most Americans do not like not paying their bills. People would rather have the flexibility of keeping their payments on time and on schedule. It is cheaper when it comes to the interest you are paying, finance charges, and the like. Yet we put people in a situation where 41 percent put off paying their bills, over 10 percent went on welfare, and another nearly 30 percent had to borrow money. I think it is far preferable to be in a situation where we allow people to have the flexibility of taking time off with pay instead of taking time off without pay. Now, there seems to be some developing consensus about the idea that there should be some capacity for comptime. Comptime is one of the items in this bill. It merely is the right to say to your employer, ``I would rather be given some time off with pay later on than be paid for overtime.'' We know that the law requires that you be paid for overtime at time and a half. This bill would allow a person to say, ``I would like to take time and a half off with pay later on, instead of being paid time and a half for the overtime.'' People are shocked to learn it is against the law now to say I would like to have some time off later on instead of being paid time and a half now--time off with pay later on. Interestingly enough, the comptime part of this bill only addresses a pretty narrow group of American citizens because the number of people who get regular overtime in our culture is pretty low. As a matter of fact, in the 1996 Current Population Survey, women who work on an hourly basis--and there are 28.9 million women who are paid on an hourly basis in this country--only 4.5 percent of them said they get overtime work in a typical work period. Even if you multiply that by five times, say you get up to 20 percent, you are dealing only with one out of every five women in the work force who would qualify for using comptime as a way of assuaging some of these tensions. Since this system is a voluntary system for both employers and employees, it is very easy to say that we will just move ourselves beyond comptime--not to say it is not valuable, that it wouldn't be important, that it wouldn't be wonderful to have. But if we give ourselves the capacity for flexible working arrangements, where especially people could schedule over a 2-week period instead of a 1- week period to average out the 40-hour week, indeed, people do have some of these benefits who are not traditionally the recipients of overtime. Another thing that stuns me is the fact that most of the people who get overtime are men. Overtime typically focuses on industries that are male dominated. There are about two men getting overtime for every woman that is getting overtime. So even if you are talking about the fact that overall, on balance, you might be entitled to a third of all the hourly workers who get some type of regular overtime, or enough of it to make a difference to help compensate meeting the demands of their family and the home place and the workplace, one-third really is really not addressing the problem of what we ought to address. We need to address this problem in a way which is comprehensive. So having flexible working arrangements for the entire population, and not just focusing the opportunity to assuage attention on those individuals who are regularly recipients of the opportunity for overtime, is very important. That is why the flextime part of this bill is important. If we really want this bill to address the needs of women, of which only 4.5 percent get overtime in any typical workweek, according to the 1996 Current Population Survey, we really ought to make sure that we do more than just have comptime legislation, that we have flextime legislation as well. President Clinton and many Democrat Senators have voiced support for flextime, the central idea within the Family Friendly Workplace Act. Polls show that the vast majority of Americans favor flexible work schedules. They want legislation that would give them parity with Federal Government workers. Incidentally, comptime is available to every State local government worker. The Federal law makes it available as well. People would like to have legislation that would give them the opportunity to choose scheduling options that would help their families. Penn and Schoen, the President's own pollsters, have reported that 75 percent of America wants the choice of comptime. Last month's Money magazine published a poll revealing that 64 percent of the public overall, and 68 percent of the women, would occasionally prefer time off in lieu of overtime if they have a choice. Nothing in this bill would make someone forever choose that it had to be one way or another. You could maintain the opportunity to have overtime pay most of the time when you had overtime, but you could on occasion say, ``I would really prefer to take this time and a half off later than to have the time and a half in pay.'' From the remarks we hear from the Democrats, I think they say they want the same thing. I believe they do have an appreciation for the need of workers in this setting. If this is really the case, if everybody wants flextime, some have specific difficulties with this bill, I hope that Senators would come down and offer amendments. We are at a point where we need to begin to work out, fine tune, and develop a bill which will result in the workers of this country having the benefits which all of us believe they need and want. According to all the accounts I have heard, people want this bill on both sides of the aisle. The President has been heralding the benefits of flextime for the last 2 years. In his State of the Union Address, as part of his campaign, and as recently as the last several weeks, he spoke very favorably, saying that flexible working arrangements are very important. Mrs. Clinton has made statements on national television over and over again. Now we have a situation where we have gridlock in the Nation's Capital. I think it is time for us to break that impasse. I think it is time to work out this measure. It is time for individuals who say they have objections to the bill to come to the floor and offer those kinds of compromises that would adjust the bill so as to make it acceptable. We want a bill. The Democrats have said they want a bill. I think it is time to work together and to work out Senators' concerns here on the Senate floor in the process in which the Senate is best served to undertake, and where the Senate works at its best, it works to the benefit of the American people. So let's work together and hammer out our concerns on the Senate floor. If Senators dislike specific provisions or language in the bill, I say come down and offer your suggestions, your amendments. Let's make sure that we don't allow this bill to be one which fails to move because none of us is willing to consider change. Let's try to say that since we all want this, let's move it forward, place it before the Senate, and ask the Senate to act in its wisdom on proposals and amendments so that the will of the Senate might work out the will of the people. This particular opportunity we have is a good one. It is one which I believe can really benefit the working people of this country and will help us as a nation as we move into the next century. If the studies of the GAO were correct, and 10-to-1 people think that this is a good system when they have had a chance to live under it, and the morale goes up and the productivity goes up, this is a policy that is a win-win situation and should be extended to all workers. It is a policy change which should be considered high on the agenda of the Senate, not on one party or the other, but high on the agenda of the American people and should, therefore, be high on the agenda of the Senate. Let's work together. Let's come to the floor. Let's make proposals for amendments. Let's work out our differences so that we can respond to the President, who said he wants to have a measure that addresses this issue, and let's find a way to do it in a way which will benefit the people of this country. Mrs. HUTCHISON addressed the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT. The data which I cite was that only 4.5 percent of the working women reported that they get overtime in a regular work period. That is the data in the Current Population Survey.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Mr. President, first of all, I thank my colleague from Massachusetts for engaging in this debate. I think it is important to do that, to refine what we are talking about, to learn what works and what won't work and learn where we might need to modify what we are doing. I am eager to have amendments offered by those individuals who want to change this proposal, and I think we will be getting to that very shortly, and I am grateful. I just point out that he indicated that the situation with the mother of twin 2-year-old daughters would be covered under the Democratic proposal. Her company doesn't provide for overtime. Her company just doesn't ask people to work overtime, and the Democratic proposal simply doesn't address the needs of the vast majority of individuals in the country who don't get overtime. I think we need to do that. There are lots of companies who just don't do it. They can't afford for their labor costs to go up by 50 percent by having overtime, so they hire enough workers, schedule enough people, pay enough benefits. But this young mother says, ``My company doesn't schedule overtime.'' So the only way for her to have the capacity to develop the ability to serve her daughters without taking a pay cut would be if we had some kind of flextime proposal similar to the one offered in the U.S. Government to Federal employees. It has worked well here. As a matter of fact, 10 to 1 the workers say it is very, very good. The General Accounting Office, which assesses whether things work or don't work in the Federal Government, indicate because people have the kind of flexibility they need, these workers in the Federal Government are more productive and their morale is better. I think that would be the same kind of thing in which private employers would want to engage. They would want to help their workers be more productive, have better morale, and extend to them the same kind of benefits that are available to Federal employees. You may just say all the various things you want to say about this, but there are a couple key facts. It is totally voluntary, and not only do you have your first choice, but you have your second choice. If you choose to bank some hours and then you choose to cash them in later, you can cash them in. So your first choice is whether or not to put hours in the bank instead of taking the pay. But any time later, before you take the hours off, you can cash them in. That is choice No. 2. This isn't a plan that is just characterized by choice, this is a plan characterized by choice squared. This is two choices, and I believe in this case two choices are better than one because they provide insurance. Second, it is a plan which would give people an opportunity to take time off without taking a pay cut, and that is something that we need. It is a plan that would deal with all the work force in the country, not just the few who regularly get, or with some frequency get, overtime pay. In my judgment, those are very important components, and I think given the fact there is substantial agreement about the needs-- and I don't think anybody will come to us and really say the needs are focused only on people who get overtime in their work--it is pretty clear that people who don't get overtime, their kids have problems, they have the needs for the parent-teacher conferences, just like other folks, and I think it is time now to work together. I hope the amendments will begin to be brought to the floor, and we will vote on these amendments. I am not in favor of curtailing the amount of time available to this bill. I think we ought to run this through the series of proposals, and the Senator has been kind enough to mention a number of them, that apparently will be coming forth. Frankly, we are going to be working this evening and into the day tomorrow to try and make sure if there are misunderstandings or clarifications that can be the basis for agreements, that we will provide those. I thank the Chair.

Mr. ASHCROFT. Will the Senator yield?

John Ashcroft

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