No pay for overtime: 'family friendly' Republicans want to lift the forty-hour work week.

• Author: Nichols, John

Cass Ballenger is the millionaire owner o a non-union plastics factory in North Carolina. He moonlights as a conservative Republican Congressman from that state. Marianne Hart is an hourly worker at a plastics factory in California. Her second-shift schedule doesn't leave much time

Ballenger and other Congressional Republicans claim they want to help Hart by giving her more flexibility on the job so she can balance the demands of work and family. Hart is dubious.

These are the same guys who opposed increasing the minimum wage, who opposed family and medical leave, who opposed national health care, and who backed NAFTA and GATT, right?" she says, during a break from applying labels to Valvoline oil containers. "So now I'm supposed to believe they've suddenly decided to become the champions of the workers -- especially women workers. What's wrong with this picture?"

That's a question a lot of working people may be asking in the next few months. Ballenger and U.S. Senator John Ashcroft, Republican of Missouri, are invoking the rhetoric of feminism and Worker empowerment to advance corporate America's boldest assault on labor rights in decades. If they sell their package of labor-law "reforms" to Congress and the Clinton Administration -- a prospect that is not at all unlikely -- they may succeed in undermining the safeguards that protect people like Marianne Hart.

The forty-hour work week is at stake. The Ballenger and Ashcroft bills would gut the part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that requires companies to pay employees who work more than forty hours a week one-and-a-half times their hourly salary.

Their bills would allow employers to structure schedules with an eye toward getting maximum work at minimum pay out of their employees. Employers could squeeze fifty, sixty, even seventy hours in a week from their workers without paying them overtime. In return, the workers would get the option of taking "compensatory" time off later on. But when they could take that time off would be up to the boss.

The length of the average work week for U.S. industrial employees has been rising steadily since 1980, to a recent high last December of almost forty-four hours. When employers have to pay employees for those extra hours at a time-and-a-half rate, it costs them dearly. But if they could "pay" employees with comp time doled out during slow periods, bosses could extend work weeks with little economic liability and virtually no incentive to...