Some 226,517 letters and more than 12,000 phone calls to members of Congress from working families helped convince the U.S. House of Representatives to call off a floor vote on a bill that would have undermined the 40-hour workweek.

However, workers weren't so lucky in other areas, including the Bush administration's third tax cut for the wealthy and news that unemployment reached 6.1 percent in May – the highest rate since July 1994 – with 9 million Americans out of work.

H.R. 1119, which would allow employers to give workers compensatory time off instead of time-and-a-half pay after 40 hours, was due for a floor vote on June 5. However, House Republican leadership canceled the vote after members of their own party balked at their constituents' response.

The AFL-CIO is waging a major union activist campaign against the Bush administration's and congressional majority's attacks on the 40 hour workweek. The AFL-CIO tracked the response by working families to its campaign.

The AFL-CIO said the bill, called the "Family Time Flexibility Act" and sponsored by Rep. Judy Biggert (R Ill.), would give workers less control over their work time – not more – and cut their pay. The AFL-CIO said all working families know that, in the reality of the workplace, employers, not workers, will choose when employees must work overtime and when they can take comp time and assign overtime only to workers who agree to take comp time instead of overtime pay.

The bill also would pay a big cash bonus to employers by allowing them to delay comp time and overtime pay for a year, according to economic analysts.

AFL-CIO Pres. John J. Sweeney said: "After pushing this bill for months, the Republican leadership finally realized that not all of their members would blindly go along with unraveling the basic right to overtime pay, which could literally take billions out of the paychecks of working families. I commend the Republicans who stood up to their leadership on this issue and stood with working families."

The companion bill in the Senate, S.317, includes a provision that would eliminate the 40-hour workweek and substitute an 80-hour two-week work period. Workers who work 50 hours in one week, for example, would not receive any overtime pay or comp time, the AFL-CIO said.

Regulatory threats to overtime pay

On another front, the Bush administration proposed regulatory changes to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that the AFL-CIO said would eliminate overtime for hundreds of thousands of workers.

The AFL-CIO said the Bush proposals would: exclude currently protected workers from overtime requirements by reclassifying them as managers, administrative or professional employees who are not eligible; eliminate certain middle-income workers from overtime protections by adding an income limit – $22,100 a year – above which workers not automatically qualify for overtime; and remove overtime protections for large numbers of workers in aerospace, defense, health care, high tech, and other industries.

Bush robs the hood again

Working families will see little benefit from the Bush administration's newest effort to give away more money to the already wealthy, according to economists. The tax bill got through the Senate only with Vice President Cheney's tie-breaking vote.

The tax cut package, proposed by Bush and reshaped by the House and Senate, has an "official" cost of $350 billion through 2013. But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said its true cost – without the "massive use of budget gimmicks" – will be closer to $1 trillion.

The center said that households that make more than $1 million a year will receive an average tax cut of $93,500 in 2003. Households in the middle income spectrum will receive an average tax cut of $217. Some 36 percent of households will receive no tax cut at all, and 53 percent will receive $100 or less, according to a report by the center.

Economists overwhelmingly agreed that, contrary to Bush administration claims, the tax cut will do little to stimulate the economy since the rich will tend to save their windfall rather than spend it.

A study by Citizens for Tax Justice and another by the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute found that middle income taxpayers will shoulder a greater share of all federal taxes by the end of the decade, thanks to Bush's three tax cuts.

The AFL-CIO's Sweeney noted the bigger picture: "To pay for the tax cuts, Congress had to approve budget cuts to health care, education and homeland security, and borrow from Medicare and Social Security. For months, the public has urged Congress to strengthen the future of these priorities instead of committing needed resources to tax cuts for the rich."

Suffer the children

At Graphic Communicator presstime, the Senate voted 94 to 2 to restore a provision that had been in the tax cut bill that expands child credits for some 12 million low-income children. To help pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy, House and Senate Republicans deliberately dropped the provision during closed-door negotiations on the final bill. House Republican leaders said they would fight the restoration.

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) said that, "instead of leaving no child behind, the administration's tax plan left 12 million children behind. The Senate is acting today with strong bipartisan action to correct this unjust and deliberate omission. Now, these hard-working, tax-paying families will get their fair share of tax relief."

However, the Senate's restoration of the credits for low-income families carried the price tag crafted by Republicans of raising the income eligibility cutoff for the $1,000 child credit for married couples from the current $110,000 to $150,000 in 2010.

Prescription drug benefits

Also at Graphic Communicator presstime, leaders of the Senate Finance Committee announced a compromise on a plan to provide prescription drug coverage to the 40 million senior citizens in the Medicare program as part of the committee's redesign of the program.

Under the plan drafted by committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Max Baucus (Mont.), the committee's senior Democrat, the government beginning in 2006 would pay half of the cost of prescription drugs until the annual limit of $3,450 is reached. Participants would have to pay a $35 monthly premium and a $275 annual deductible. After a patient's out-of-pocket spending on medicine reaches $3,700, the government would picket up 90 percent of the cost. People in private health plans would receive the coverage through those plans. People in the Medicare program – about 90 percent of seniors – would receive the benefits through stand-alone health insurance policies.

The AFL-CIO said the plan "could make the problem worse, not better," by possibly encouraging employers to drop existing prescription drug coverage for an estimated 3 million retirees who have it today.