Congressman Jim Moran's News Commentary

This week, the Bush Administration implemented sweeping new changes to the nation's overtime pay regulations. In the wake of these new rules, overtime pay, a staple for America's working families, has the potential to be taken away from millions of workers nationwide.

And that's the problem. No one really knows the effect of the new rules. Projections of the new, so-called "Fair Pay" initiative vary wildly, depending on who is doing the analyses. On the pro side, the Bush Administration and Department of Labor claim that only 107,000 workers will lose their overtime pay, while new rules will give overtime rights to approximately 1.3 million previously ineligible employees. On the opposing side, many in organized labor and the progressive Economic Policy Institute have projected that over 6 million workers will lose their overtime with only a few workers gaining from the changes.

These discrepancies highlight the concerns that I have with the proposed changes. At a time when nationally, American job growth is static and over a million jobs have been lost in the past four years, does it make sense to implement new rules whose effects on the American worker are ambiguous? The underlying reason for the administration's strong push to implement the "Fair Pay" initiative was to stop frivolous labor lawsuits. But even the rules' impact in that arena has been called into serious question and stands on shaky legal ground.

Before these new changes went into effect, around 115 million workers were covered by the overtime rules created in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. The concept of overtime pay was initiated to insure that American workers were protected from employers forcing them to work more than 40 hours a week without extra compensation. In the past 65 plus years, it has enabled millions of families to send their kids off to college, afford a home and keep food and medicine in pantries across the country. I don't know of any experts that believe this policy has been anything short of a major success.

Thus, it is in this spirit of historically protecting the rights of working Americans that we should not be taking actions that could drastically strip overtime benefits. Rather, we should be making them available to a greater number of U.S. wage earners. In this case, the Bush Administration has been once again off in its timing and intent on an issue of great importance to American workers. Gambling with an essential piece of the safety net for American workers is wrong. The impact of this policy change clearly needed to be more fully researched and assessed prior to implementation. Unfortunately, we are forced to take a wait and see approach to determine what the outcome of "Fair Pay" will be. Whether there is really anything "fair" about it in the long run has yet to be determined.