Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, this is an amendment about which I spoke at some length yesterday and the day before on the floor. Others spoke on it also. This is the amendment that would preclude the administration from issuing final proposed regulations that would take away the right of up to 8 million to 10 million Americans to get overtime pay if they work over 40 hours a week. Just to recap for a minute, earlier this year, sort of under the cover of darkness, without one hearing, the Department of Labor issued proposed regulations to modify the Fair Labor Standards Act that would basically modify, in a very drastic manner, how employers would decide who was covered under overtime law and who was not. Now, again, this has been in existence since 1938. We have had some changes in it since that time, but none as sweeping as the Administration has proposed this spring and that would result in millions of working Americans losing their overtime pay protection. The Department of Labor has said this only affects about 644,000 workers. Well, they're only counting the people are currently, routinely work overtime and receive overtime pay. There are about 8 to 10 million people who are qualified to get overtime pay, but they are not working overtime. Again, if an employer were to ask them to work overtime, then they would get time and a half. Well, this pending regulation would take that away for many workers. And then we'll see their employers require them to work longer hours, without pay. The first wave of people who will be most affected by this will be working women, women who work on a salary basis, maybe as accountants, working in banks, insurance companies, whatever, women who have children in childcare, daycare centers. Now they are going to be asked to work longer hours with no more pay, but they are going to have to continue to pay more for childcare. This is antiworker. This is antifamily. And its bad economics. Obviously, if I am an employer, and I don't have to pay overtime pay, and I can work people longer than 40 hours a week, I'm not going to hire new people. And I will--not today; I know others want to speak this morning--but when we come back next week I will be laying out in even more detail how it is that American workers are working longer than workers in all other industrialized countries, and now they are being asked to work longer without even being paid for it. I think this is one of the most crucial issues facing this Congress this year: whether we are going to sit back and let the administration change, sort of by fiat--not by legislation, not through the hearing process and the developing of legislation and the votes here--but just through rules and regulations, to just wipe out--wipe out--the protections 8 to 10 million working Americans have to guarantee that if they have to work over 40 hours a week, they are going to get at least time-and-a-half overtime. Just wipe out the 40-hour work week, that has been law for 65 years now.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendments.

Mr. HARKIN. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays on both amendments.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Go ahead.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I see my colleague from Michigan on the floor. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Senator from New York for her remarks. I just appreciate her eloquence and her strength in supporting this proposal to rebuild and modernize our schools. I wonder if the Senator from New York is aware of the number of jobs being created. I understand there is an estimate that this $1 billion would create about 24,000 jobs in the entire United States. There is an article in this morning's paper which said the President is going to come up with a new budget request for Iraq of between $60 billion and $70 billion--twice what we were told about two months ago. In July, we had a briefing by Mr. Bremer, who is our counsel over there. He gets to write all these checks for money in Iraq. He said something I couldn't believe I heard, so I wrote it down. He said they were putting a lot of money into rebuilding infrastructure in Baghdad-- the streets, the sewers, and rebuilding schools because they found they got more bang for the buck when they put it in that. I can't understand why we can do that in Iraq but we can't do the same here in the United States. The leveraging of money has been great in the past with what we have done for schools. I might ask again if the Senator will yield for a question. I am sure the Senator is aware the offset we are using we already used before to get an additional $2.2 billion for the bill. I am told there is about $13 million that could be used as an offset. I am wondering why we can't use this offset to get money to help rebuild and modernize our schools. I am sort of at a loss. I wonder if maybe the Senator might know why we can't use this money. Since we have already used some of it before in the bill, why we can't use it for this?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, pursuant to section 504(b)(2) of H. Con. Res. 95, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2004, I move to waive section 504 of that concurrent resolution for purposes of the pending amendment, and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. HARKIN. All of them. (Mr. GRAHAM of South Carolina assumed the Chair.)

Mr. HARKIN. I respond to the Senator from Massachusetts, from all the polls we have seen, all the data we have seen, the American people do not want this. They want more overtime pay protection, not less. I say to the Senator from Massachusetts, while he was speaking, I was thinking about something I said a few days ago about the fact that the administration is turning the clock back prior to 1938 when we passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. And someone said that was sort of overblown rhetoric on my part--that of course no one wants to turn the clock back. As I started doing more research into what happened with the Fair Labor Standards Act, I came across an interesting item. The first kind of strikes that occurred asking for an 8-hour day started in 1886, the famous Haymarket Square riot in Chicago. That was trying to get an 8- hour day at that time. This finally built up to the 1930s during the Great Depression. The 40-hour workweek was a compromise. The Senate, in 1937, passed a measure providing for a 30-hour workweek. Think about that. If we were to propose a 30-hour workweek around here, I don't know how many votes you would get. You would not get many. In 1937, the Senate passed a measure providing for a 30-hour workweek. It was only because business ganged up and they said they had to compromise, and they compromised on a 40-hour workweek. So when I say they are turning the clock back to before 1938, I mean it. That is exactly what they are trying to do, put us back to a time when people worked 10, 12 hours a day with no compensation for it and had little time with their families. That is exactly what this measure is intended to do. You couple that with what the Senator from Massachusetts said about Davis-Bacon, the fact that we can't even get a vote on the minimum wage. The Senator from Massachusetts for the last couple, 3 years has been trying to get this vote up. We can't get a vote up. They won't let us vote on it. I hope we will vote sometime this year on the minimum wage. But these are all attacks on workers.

Mr. HARKIN. I first wish to thank the senior Senator from Massachusetts for his many years of leadership and support on issues that really affect working families in America. No one has fought longer and harder and more successfully in the past to protect the working families of America than the senior Senator from Massachusetts. I am very proud to have his support for this amendment and for his joining us in trying to do what we can to stop this assault on the American working families, as the Senator so ably pointed out. I must say to the Senator that people ask me all the time: Why would they do this? Why would the administration, sort of under the cover of darkness, want to at this point in time, or any time, take away the protections of overtime pay for millions of Americans? I must tell the Senator from Massachusetts that I am hard pressed to answer that question. Why would they want to do this? I throw up my arms. It makes no sense economically. It is antifamily, as the Senator from Massachusetts pointed out. It is bad economic policy. We are not going to create more jobs. In fact, we will cause the loss of more jobs. I am hard pressed. I wonder if the Senator has any ideas to help me answer constituents and others who ask me why the administration proposes an outlandish assault on working families. I am at a loss. I don't know if the Senator can help me. Maybe they have given in to some of the people in the business community. As I say, it is not all the people. Not all the people in the business community agree with us. But there are a few who are pushing. Maybe the answer is that people in the business community just want to be able to tell their workers what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, with no restrictions whatsoever on how they tell their workers what to do and when they can work. That is the best I can come up with.

Mr. HARKIN. I just respond to the Senator, he made a great point. I can only say what Reuters news agency reported 1 day ago, yesterday, saying: The White House issued a veto threat . . . against a Democratic bid to derail its proposed changes in federal work rules that [would] cost millions of Americans overtime pay. . . . If the Senate adopted the amendment, President Bush's advisers would recommend he veto the spending bill, the White House budget office said. I say to the Senator from Massachusetts, this is again mind-boggling, that if the Senate expresses its will that we do not want these rules to go into effect, they are going to veto this bill that has money in it for vital basic medical research for all of NIH, the National Institutes of Health, all of the funding for higher education and Pell grants--and, by the way, I know the Senator and others have amendments to make sure we get those Pell grants up, and I support him in that effort--all of the funding for elementary and secondary education, Head Start programs, maternal and child health care programs. They are going to veto the whole thing because they are so adamant that they want to take away overtime pay from American workers. I hope this is a mistake. I hope Reuters was wrong, but I can only rely upon what they have said. The White House has not communicated this to me directly, but this has been reported from the White House, that they are going to veto this bill over this. I say to the Senator from Massachusetts, I am glad he mentioned that because, again, it just shows to me the zeal--the zeal--with which this administration and their advisers want to attack working families in this country and to take away overtime pay; that they are willing to put out that threat of a veto and take away Head Start Program funding, maternal and child health care, elementary and secondary education, all the other things that are in this bill, simply because they want to take away overtime pay from millions of American workers. Again, I find this bordering on the bizarre.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. HARKIN. I understand we want some people back for that, too, on NIH.

Mr. HARKIN. I understand we can have votes tomorrow on certain amendments. The Senator has an amendment which I am supporting on NIH. Is that going to be offered here this afternoon? We could vote on that. We have amendments on both sides. I am supporting that amendment, as my friend knows. Why can't we vote on that?

Mr. HARKIN. We have a vote at 5 o'clock, I understand. Was that already ordered? Oh, not yet. There is the rural education amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. I understand there are some amendments coming down this afternoon. There are some amendments pending right now.

Mr. HARKIN. I would like to ask my good friend, the chairman of the committee, does he know from the leadership on his side whether we will be having votes tomorrow? If we are, that is fine. We will get some votes packed in tomorrow, on some amendments tomorrow. I don't know. No one has advised me.

Mr. HARKIN. Waterloo, MO.

Mr. HARKIN. Does that mean you will accept all our amendments and just go to third reading?

Mr. HARKIN. What a jester you are. I wouldn't mind it.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I take the floor for a few minutes to discuss an amendment Senator Kennedy and I and others plan to offer to address a very important issue, one that affects the livelihood of millions of American workers and their families. It is an issue that bubbled up earlier this year when the Department of Labor--and I choose this word carefully--sort of surreptitiously issued proposed regulations, changes in regulations that would affect the 40-hour workweek and take away overtime protection for millions of American workers. They did not have one hearing on that. They published it, put this out as a proposed change in the rules and regulations. Not too many people knew about it. However, I am now aware that over 78,000 comments have come in on this issue from around the country. So now the Department of Labor is hearing back, and more and more Americans are beginning to find out about this proposal. Senator Kennedy and I, and a number of our colleagues, will offer an amendment to protect the 40-hour workweek and to make sure overtime protections are there for American workers. What the administration has proposed is a change in our regulations that would eliminate the 40-hour workweek by allowing employers to deny millions of workers overtime pay, workers who are currently covered and guaranteed overtime pay protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This proposal by the administration is antiworker, it is antifamily, and it is bad economic policy. It is an attack on America's middle class. It won't create one job in our struggling economy. In fact, it will do just the opposite. It will cost us jobs. It is part of what I call the ``economic malpractice'' of this administration. And it is working Americans who are the victims. Unemployment continues to climb. It is now at 6.2 percent, the highest level since 1994. That means 9.4 million people looking for work can't find any. Since President Bush was sworn in, we have lost 3.1 million private sector jobs. We are losing jobs every month. The economy is limping along. Our deficit continues to bloom. It is now over $450 billion, I am told, by the end of this year and may be $500 billion by the end of next year. So the administration passed two record tax cuts for the wealthy to explode the deficit. And instead of trying to put money in the pockets of working Americans, the administration now wants to take it away, taking money out of the pockets of hard-working Americans, hard-working Americans who may be working overtime to help pay some extra bills. Late last month, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report that analyzed the reach of this administration's proposal. It found that up to 8 million workers who currently are eligible for overtime pay will lose that eligibility. And as they noted, overtime pay for many of these workers can make up to 25 percent of the family's income. We are talking about people such as nurses, police officers, firefighters, retail managers, journalists, medical technicians, surveyors, among a whole host of others. For most of these men and women, that overtime pay is not spare change or for frivolous spending; it is essential. It helps pay the mortgage, feed the kids, and maybe put a little bit away for college for their kids or save a little bit for retirement. I have a recent letter from the National Association of Police Organizations that represents thousands of law enforcement officers from across the country. They oppose the administration's proposal because, as they said: [U]nder such regulations, America's State and local law enforcement officers, already strained by countless overtime hours ensuring community safety from terrorist threats, could lose their basic benefit accorded for their efforts. A recent national survey shows that working Americans are now becoming more aware of this proposal and have great concerns about it. A survey released this past week by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, pollsters, found that Americans overwhelmingly disagree with the Bush administration proposal. By 17 to 1, the public believes that Federal laws governing overtime should be changed to cover more employees rather than fewer. Fifty-one percent said it should cover more employees. Only 3 percent said it should cover fewer employees. Seventy-four percent of Americans in this poll oppose the Bush administration's proposal to eliminate several million employees' legal right to overtime pay. I would like to take a few minutes to explain briefly how the rules work right now under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Hourly workers are generally guaranteed overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours a week. That has been accepted since 1938. Many salaried workers are also eligible for overtime pay under current law. So what the administration's proposal would do would be to make it much easier for employers to deny salaried workers overtime pay protection. The result is that millions of salaried workers, earning more than $22,100 a year, currently eligible for overtime will be denied overtime under these proposed changes. This proposal will keep workers from spending time with their families, working longer hours without compensation. Employers will be able to force workers to work longer hours without pay. In case someone says that isn't happening, I suggest they might want to go back and read the story in the Sunday Post of August 31 by Kirstin Downey, who documented some of the things that are happening in the country today. For example, Wal-Mart Stores, Incorporated, the Nation's largest retailer, is facing 37 lawsuits in 29 States from employees who allege they were illegally forced to work extra hours free to meet corporate productivity demands. In December, a Federal jury in Portland, OR, found Wal-Mart guilty of asking workers to clock out and then return to work unpaid. About 400 current and former Wal-Mart employees participated in the lawsuit, with some workers testifying that they falsified their time records to keep their jobs because they live in small towns with few other jobs. About 270 insurance claims adjusters have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, alleging that their employer, GEICO, broke the law by improperly classifying them as workers exempt from overtime pay. Stan Fortune, quoted in this article, age 47, a former Wal-Mart manager in Weatherford, TX, said he felt driven to climb into store management ranks during the 17 years he worked there. On one temporary assignment in Las Vegas, he said he worked 13 to 14 hours a day from September 1 through December 26 with only 1 day off. Said Fortune: It builds up to where that's the norm. You get three or four hours' sleep. It becomes what you are used to. Now that I look back it is pretty sad. That is happening around the country today. More and more workers are being asked to work longer hours. What the administration wants to do is say: We will make that legal. We are just going to exempt them. American workers already work longer hours than any other industrialized country. Right now, according to this article in the Washington Post, according to the International Labor Organization, American workers work more than other people in developed economies. They found that American workers put in an average of 1,825 hours per year. French workers, by comparison, average 1,545 hours per year; German workers, about 1,444 hours per year. According to Lawrence Johnson, chief of the ILO's employment trends team: The European Union and the United States have two different systems and react to economic conditions differently. . . . A lot of what Europeans have--longer vacations, shorter hours-- are legislated, and in the United States, it is handled through collective bargaining. The problem is now only 13 percent of American workers are covered under collective bargaining. So most workers are not in the collective bargaining agreements that cover overtime. Major women's organizations, including the National Partnership for Women and Families and the American Association of University Women, oppose this proposal because they fear that an increase in mandatory overtime would take time away from families and disrupt the schedules of working parents as well as impose additional childcare and other expenses. Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute has shown that this proposal, probably more than anything else, affects women in this country. It is women who are working in these jobs that are about at that level, but it is also the women who have to take their children to childcare. So get this: What the administration is saying is that you will have to leave your child in childcare longer hours during the day. You will be forced to work overtime, longer hours, but you won't get one more nickel for it. Talk about fairness. Talk about compassion. This proposal will not create one new job. It will do just the opposite. What it will do is give employers a disincentive to hire people because it will allow them to work their current workers longer hours, force them to work longer hours without any extra pay. When President Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law in 1938, he made that exact point, that if a worker is working 50 hours a week and not getting paid for that, it does two things--takes him away from his family and, secondly, it is a disincentive to hire anyone else to work. So that is what this proposal will do. It will add to the unemployment figures in America, not put people to work. As columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote in the New York Times: You would think that an administration that has presided over the loss of millions of jobs might want to strengthen the protections of workers fortunate enough to still be employed. But that's not what the administration is about. Again, as I said in my opening, the administration does not want the American worker to find out what they are doing. They didn't hold one hearing on its proposed rule. Maybe they thought they would slip it through and people would not know about it. I don't think we should in the shadows set policy that would affect millions of workers and their families. We need to do it in the open. That is why I plan to offer this amendment. My amendment is very simple. It would prohibit any money, any taxpayer dollars, from being spent to in any way implement any administration proposal that would exempt more workers from overtime pay protections, who are now currently eligible. Very simple and straightforward. It would allow the administration today, tomorrow, or at any time, to increase the number of workers who are eligible for overtime pay. Again, I wish to take a couple of minutes to clarify some of the claims that some of the opponents of our amendment have made about the administration's proposal. The first claim is that the proposed regulation will only result in denying overtime pay protection to 644,000 workers, not 8 million. Well, that is because the administration is only counting people right now who are getting overtime pay. There are millions more eligible for overtime pay but they are not getting it because the employers don't want to pay the overtime. However, if you now exempt them, the employer has no disincentive whatsoever. They can work those people longer than 40 hours per week and not have to pay them one additional nickel. So the administration's estimate completely ignores the incentive that will be built in for employers to work these eligible people longer hours per week. Claim No. 2: The administration's proposal will actually guarantee an additional 1.3 million low-income workers overtime pay. This is an overstatement. They are saying it because they are raising the current income threshold from $8,060 a year to $22,100 a year--no one is opposed to that--and it is long overdue. Of course, it has been raised several times since 1938. According to the National Employment Law Project--a coalition representing the interests of low-wage workers--most, if not all, of those 1.3 million workers were already covered by overtime protections because they were working in low-paying nonexecutive jobs. They add that the DOL's proposed threshold increase ``does not help nearly enough workers, because 80 percent of the workforce still makes over the proposed threshold [of $22,100], and workers earning more than the threshold are barely making ends meet in today's economy.'' Again, I point out that my amendment does not affect the increase in the threshold limit. The third claim they make is that first responders--police and firemen--will not lose their overtime protection with this proposal. They have been making this claim all along. Unfortunately, the proposed regulation as written would, in fact, put many first responders--police and firefighters and others--at risk of losing overtime eligibility. There is no specific carve-out for first responders. This proposed regulation is so vague that it would apply to many first responders who may have minimal supervisory duties. The National Association of Police Officers and the International Union of Police Associations both oppose the regulations as written. The fourth claim: This proposal simplifies current regulations, and it will make it easier for employers to determine who qualifies for overtime and who doesn't. It will also reduce litigation. Well, perhaps that is so. It would reduce litigation because it is going to exempt all these people from overtime protection. But it is not going to make it easier. In fact, it would make the rules more confusing by replacing well-established standards with vague and ambiguous language and would spawn litigation over the meaning of these new rules. According to the Chicago Tribune: The Labor Department's [Wage and Hour Administrator] Tammy McCutchen predicts a deluge of lawsuits as employees and employers press for clarifications once the new rules go into effect. Also, a recent analysis by the Congressional Research Service found that the proposal is vague--it will be largely up to the interpretation of employers and the Labor Department to determine who qualifies and who doesn't qualify for overtime pay protection. So what that says to me is that employers will have wide discretion-- compared to what they have now--to reclassify and disqualify all kinds of workers from overtime pay protection in order to make them work longer hours without compensation. I don't really expect the Labor Department to proactively go around and check on these employers. They don't do it now. What if a worker complains? How many workers are going to risk losing their jobs by complaining? As a person who worked for Wal-Mart said, ``In a small town there are no other jobs. Therefore, when they want you to work overtime without any extra pay, that is what you do.'' I close by saying that I also believe this proposed regulation is designed to give cover to employers that are already abusing standing overtime laws. Lawsuits by the hundreds--cases pending before the Labor Department that are now months and years backlogged--will be wiped off the books because now the employers that are denying overtime pay will be legal in doing so. So why do we want to make it easier to deny American workers overtime pay? How does it help the economy to take money away from millions of low- and middle-income men and women? Again, the administration's proposal will do nothing to put money in the pockets of working Americans. It will not create new jobs. It will keep people away from their families longer hours. It is a slap in the face to millions of hard-working Americans--men and women who are starting to make ends meet and yet spend some time with their families. It is bad policy. We have an opportunity to stop it with my amendment. I plan to offer that shortly. I urge my colleagues to support it. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I thank my chairman, friend and able leader on this appropriations bill. I think we all wish we had a little bit more 302(b) allocation but that is for another time and place. Earlier today I spoke about offering an amendment that would basically prohibit the administration from moving ahead on implementing a proposed rule that would basically undermine and do away with the 40- hour workweek that we have had in the Fair Labor Standards Act since 1938. Earlier this spring, the administration proposed some rule changes. Not one hearing was held on it. As we looked through these proposed rules this summer and dug into them, it would drastically undermine the ability of working families, working men and women in America, to get justly compensated for overtime work in the future. I was talking to one of my colleagues today about this, and he said to me, I have not really had a big clamor in my State for these changes. I got to thinking about it. I got to thinking I really have not had anybody in the past year or 2 years ago, or earlier this year-- I have seen no real groundswell or anything about the fact that these rules as they exist now need to be changed. I do not know where this comes from. All of a sudden they are proposing this massive change in the way people's work is defined in this country and whether they are exempted from overtime pay or not. So I have an amendment that I drafted that basically is just very simple. It says: None of the funds provided under this Act shall be used to promulgate or implement any regulation that exempts from the requirements of section 7 of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C. 207) any employee who is not otherwise exempted pursuant to regulations under section 13 of such act (29 U.S.C. 213) that were in effect as of September 3, 2003. So this is an amendment that I will be laying down sometime tomorrow. I mention again that this proposed rule change could affect up to 8 million workers, but the first wave of people that will be affected by this rule change will be women who are working in salaried positions that today would be paid overtime if they worked more than 40 hours a week. These would be women who work as bookkeepers, accountants, secretaries, nurses, nurse's aides, a whole host of different occupations. I say women because the way that theworkforce is structured, where the salary level is, they will fall in that lower spectrum of salary level where it will be above the minimum but it will be in the range where they will now be exempted from overtime work. That will be the first wave. That is just the first people who would be affected by it. After that, there would be many other people affected by it--police officers, firefighters, first responders, and others. There is no carve-out in the proposed rules and regulations for police, firefighters, and emergency personnel. They are thrown in with everybody else. So somehow I keep hearing this kind of a rumor or statement that keeps floating around that, oh, police officers will not be affected. Well, would someone show me in the proposed rules where it says that police officers will not be affected? It is nowhere in there. So I do not know what they are talking about. They are thrown in with everybody else. Again, I do not want to take too much more time. I will lay down the amendment tomorrow morning at the appropriate time. For the life of me, though, I cannot understand why the administration is proposing this drastic change when there has been no big groundswell for the change. I have heard some people in this room say we have to change it because it has not been changed since 1938. That is nonsense. We have changed the Fair Labor Standards Act several times since 1938. In fact, a number of times this has been changed without taking away overtime for people in our country. So to say it has not been changed since 1938 is simply erroneous. A number of times we have addressed ourselves to new types of work, new definitions, new people in the workforce, by changing some of the definitions. In every case in which these definitions were changed they were changed to make it easier, to include more people in the overtime provisions, not to exclude people. For example, the Department of Labor revised the overtime regulations in 1940, 1949, 1954, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1967, 1970, 1973, 1975, and 1981. In not one of those instances was the framework narrowed to exclude more people from overtime protections. These changes were made basically to enlarge, enhance, and to better define who was covered, and that is why it never really invoked much debate or consternation because we recognized that we wanted to protect people for overtime pay. The minimum salary threshold has been raised seven times since 1938. So to say that somehow we have never touched this since 1938 is absolutely wrong. What is correct is that since 1938 we have not circumscribed, we have not narrowed, the definitional framework to exclude more people from overtime pay. That is what these proposed regulations would do, and that is why the Senate has to speak strongly, I hope next week sometime, in supporting this amendment that would basically prohibit them from moving ahead with this kind of a regulation. I would point out that the House of Representatives narrowly defeated this 213 to 210, with a number of Republicans supporting not allowing the administration to proceed with these changes in rules. So, again, I hope next week we can have a further debate. I intend either tomorrow or Monday to again point out the people who are going to be affected, what it means for their families and their income. What it basically means is that we are going to have people working longer hours but they are not going to be compensated for it. As I said, many of them are women who are now paying for childcare. Well, now they have to pay to keep their children in daycare maybe longer but they do not get any extra pay for that. So that is why this proposed change in rules and regulations is one that we have to say no to. We have to make sure we continue to protect and enhance the 40-hour workweek and make sure people who work over 40 hours, if they want to work over 40 hours or if they are compelled to work over 40 hours, are justly compensated with it for time and a half over 40 hours. I yield the floor.