Workers took to the streets to pro-test the Bush administration's pay takeaways as the new overtime rules took effect Aug. 23.

In rallies and leafleting in Missouri, Ohio, Florida, and other states around the country, workers and their unions and women's and other allied groups called on Congress to repeal the Bush overtime pay rules.

In Washington, D.C., citizen groups delivered tens of thousands of signatures on petitions to the U.S. Labor Department, urging the administration to roll back the rules.

At a rally on the Labor Department steps, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) called Aug. 23 Bush's "anti-labor day" and a "national disgrace."

Harkin introduced three measures to block the new rules. Those measures passed the Senate but were blocked by Republican Senate leaders before the August congressional recess. The House also voted against the rules.

Harkin said the Bush administration's rule changes that reduce overtime eligibility for an estimated six million workers delivers a "gut punch" to the middle class that is already reeling from the loss of millions of good paying jobs and health insurance, while prices soar for fuel, food, and housing under Bush's reign.

"This is not the time to stick working families with a pay cut," Harkin said. "Time-and-a-half pay accounts for 25 percent of total income of those who work overtime. If employers no longer have to pay time-and-a-half for overtime work, they will have an incentive to demand longer hours instead of creating more jobs, taking money from the pockets of middle-class working families. Protecting workers' overtime is essential to job creation."

The Bush administration is "exporting our jobs and importing third world labor conditions," Harkin charged, referring to the administration's defense of federal incentives for businesses to move jobs to other nations.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who has taken heat from GOP leaders for his support of workers on economic, social, and safety issues, said he and Harkin both "know that there is no partisan way to deal with health, education, worker rights or worker safety."

Specter vowed "the fight is not over yet. . . . Let's keep up the fight because this is one we're going to win."

AFL-CIO Pres. John J. Sweeney told cheering workers that "history will go on record that on Aug. 23 in the year 2004, workers suffered the single biggest pay cut ever – since the founding of our country."

"Overtime is definitely the difference between working for a living and living to work," Sweeney said. He said the rule changes will provide big business – "that wanted these changes for years" – the opportunity to work more Americans longer hours for less pay.

Sweeney pledged: "If President Bush won't help us, we will elect a president who will."

In a radio address on Aug. 21, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), the Democratic vice presidential candidate, asked: "Why would anyone want to take overtime pay away from as many as 6 million Americans at a time when they need that money the most?"

Edwards and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) both favor rolling back the Bush administration's changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act – the first major attack on the New Deal legislation since it was enacted in 1938.

James Ware, a Washington, D.C., sous chef and member of UNITE-HERE Local 25, asked: "If he had to work the same kinds of jobs the rest of us do, I wonder how George Bush would feel about somebody taking away his overtime?"

Chefs such as Ware, nurses, police officers, nursery school teachers, team leaders, outside sales people and financial service employees are among those workers that analysts expect employers to reclassify as supervisory or professional to escape paying overtime under the new Bush definitions for overtime eligibility.

Joy Anderson, a registered nurse and a member of American Federation of Teachers 5089, said: "We don't get the perks like George Bush and his friends. We can't just walk through life. We have to work. They may not have to depend on overtime. We've got to pay for health care, car insurance, property taxes."

Teresa Carruthers, a nurse from Baltimore, said registered nurses already are forced to work a lot of unpaid overtime. "The Labor Department should be enforcing labor laws, not rewriting them to make violations legal," she said.