Bill to Repeal Overtime Rule Dies in Senate

Gov. Pete Wilson’s employer-backed bill to repeal the requirement that workers be paid premium rates for working more than eight hours a day was defeated Wednesday by state Senate Democrats and organized labor.

Rejection by the Senate Industrial Relations Committee marked the first time a major Assembly-passed initiative shepherded by new Republican Speaker Curt Pringle had been brought to a vote in the Democratic-dominated upper chamber.

The action also handed Republican Wilson a setback in his program to stimulate the economic recovery of California by lessening burdens on business. A spokesman for Wilson said the issue is not dead.

Press secretary Sean Walsh said the governor intends to fight for the bill this summer in a proposed Senate-Assembly conference committee on unresolved labor and business matters. “We are fully prepared to do the heavy lifting,” he said.

Supported by major employers, the bill would have abolished the state regulation that requires nonunion employees who work in excess of eight hours a day to be paid at time and a half or other premium hourly rates.

These employees, however, would continue to be covered by federal law, which requires payment of overtime rates for work performed in excess of 40 hours a week. California is one of a handful of states that has the eight-hour overtime rule.

The Industrial Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte), scuttled the bill (AB 386) by Assemblyman Fred Aguiar (R-Chino) on a party-line vote, with two Republican votes for the measure and four Democrats against.

Supporters, including nonunion working women from large employers such as Hughes Electronics, IBM and Rockwell, pleaded with the committee to repeal the overtime requirement. They argued that it blocks their ability to arrange flexible work schedules in order to meet family needs.

“It’s time to get rid of this outdated [overtime] law,” said Violeta Pearson, a secretary at Hughes Electronics in Los Angeles. “We’d like to have the flexibility to balance family and work.”

But Solis countered that the law now allows workers to petition their employers for more flexible work hours and gives the state Industrial Welfare Commission authority to grant them. “The problem is nobody has done it,” she said.

Representatives of labor, including John F. Henning, the venerable chief of the California Labor Federation AFL-CIO, attacked the proposal as anti-family. They charged that the bill would enable employers to demand longer hours of workers without the constraint of having to pay daily overtime rates.

“Who is taking care of the children? If they are low-income people, those kids are on the street,” Henning said, contending that few child care centers remain open after 6 p.m. “So we [would be] breeding a whole generation of children who [would] know nothing but the street and the hours of darkness.”

Henning was joined by other union representatives, including labor lobbyist Barry Broad, who charged that the bill “transfers hundreds of millions of dollars from the pockets of workers to the pockets of employers.”

But Republican Sen. Richard Mountjoy of Arcadia, a contractor and ally of business, ripped into labor generally and Henning personally for what he called the “deterioration of the ability of parents to be home with their children.”

“It’s been your policies over the years that have driven people to where one single parent cannot support [a] family,” Mountjoy shouted at Henning. He called Henning “arrogant . . . [and] stubborn,” and cited labor policies as “the reason that two people out of every family has to work. Don’t you forget it.”

But Henning, a veteran of bruising state and national labor battles, brushed Mountjoy’s criticism aside. He told Mountjoy he respected his good sense of humor but “my respect doesn’t extend to your economic and social desires, which is simply the voice of those who would exploit [workers].”