Paycheck Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. President, I thank my colleague, the Senator from South Dakota, for his leadership in this area. I agree with his comments and support those statements, along with the other actions taken by my colleagues from New Hampshire, Kentucky, and Nebraska, in addition to others.

I too had an amendment I wanted to present in connection with this legislation. I too offered that up and identified reasons why this is both relevant and germane to the legislation at hand. Unfortunately, the majority leader saw fit to block this, to object to it, to refuse altogether to allow the U.S. Senate--which is supposed to be the world's greatest deliberative legislative body--to consider these or any of the other amendments that were presented along with them.

We are not asking for passage by unanimous consent. We recognize some people might not share our views. We recognize there might be a diversity of opinion within the body. We nevertheless believe, as U.S. Senators, we are entitled to have these amendments considered because they are relevant, because they are germane. We also think they should be considered because they would benefit the American people.

This is the sort of thing we are supposed to do. It is what we do. What we are supposed to be doing as Senators is to be offering amendments and voting on amendments to make legislation we consider better. You see, the amendment process can make a bad bill good or at least better, and that is exactly why we have an obligation to consider amendments.

It is important to point out here that one of the reasons why I ran this amendment in the first place has to do with the fact that one of the struggles facing working families today is the constant struggle moms and dads feel as they try to juggle the work-life balance. Parents today need to juggle work, home, kids, community, and other obligations they face.

For many families, especially families with young children, the most precious commodity parents have is time. But today Federal labor laws severely, and I believe unfairly, restrict the way moms and dads and everyone else can use their time. That is because many of those laws were written decades ago--decades ago--before the Internet existed; decades ago, when a number of demographic factors were aligned much differently than they are today, when a number of social trends operated much differently in our economy than they do today. Because of these laws--these same Buddy Holly-era, Elvis-era laws--because of these same antiquated laws that need to be updated, an hourly employee who works overtime is not allowed to take comp time, not allowed to take flextime. Even if she prefers it, her boss cannot even offer it without violating Federal law.

Today, if a working mom or a working dad stays late at the office on Monday or Tuesday, and instead of receiving extra pay wants to get compensated by leaving early on Friday and spend the afternoon with the kids, that kind of arrangement could well be violating Federal law. That sounds unfair, especially to parents, and it is unfair, especially to parents and their children and everyone else.

It also seems like the kind of arrangement that should not be prohibited by Federal law but ought to be perfectly acceptable. But how do we know that for sure? Well, we know that for sure because Congress gave a special exemption from that very law--the law I just described a moment ago--that is available only for government employees. This is unacceptable. The same work-life options that have been made available by Congress itself to government employees should be available to the citizens they serve.

In May of last year, the House of Representatives responded to this deficit in existing Federal law by passing the Working Families Flexibility Act, sponsored by Representative Martha Roby of Alabama, to equalize the comp time rules, existing within a government employment context, for all workers. Last fall, I introduced companion legislation in the Senate proposing to do exactly the same thing.

Now, today, I would like to offer an amendment that is modeled on this same legislation to end this flextime discrimination, this comp time discrimination against private sector workers. You talk to any working mom or any working dad and they will tell you they need more time.

Now, Mr. President, as you well know, we cannot legislate another hour in the day. If we could, I am sure it would have been done by now, and, frankly, I am a little surprised someone has not tried it. But we know mathematically it will not work. It would not do any good. But what we can do is to help working people so they can better balance the demands they face--the demands of family and work and community and every other demand they face. We can ease some of this pressure by removing an unnecessary, outdated, and manifestly unfair Federal restriction on utilizing comp time in the private sector.

There are real problems in this world. There are bad things that can be and must be prohibited by Federal law. But the fact that working parents would prefer, quite understandably, to spend more time with their families is not one of those things that needs to be prohibited, nor is it one of those things that we should allow to continue to be prohibited, especially when it is prohibited in a patently unfair discriminatory fashion--one that inures to the benefit of government employees, inures unfairly to the detriment of everyone else.

Congress needs to stop punishing America's moms and dads for wanting the same fair treatment that government employees are able to receive through comp time and flextime programs. The United States of America deserves to have amendments like this one, and other amendments, that would make our laws less intrusive, less oppressive, less unfair, that would lead to the development of a more fair, just economy, and a more fair, just system of laws.

We are never going to be able to get there if we are not even allowed to debate and discuss and vote on it, consider, much less pass, amendments. It is time to restore the Senate to what it was always intended to be, which is the world's greatest deliberative legislative body. That cannot happen when amendments like this one are categorically blocked from consideration. We must end this. We must do better. We can and we must and we will.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source