Why H.R. 1406 is Bullshit

[digitaldiscipline]

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1406/text

I railed about the GOP being assholes for the party line passage of this earlier this morning on the bookface, but that's a shit venue for a dissection of why.

On the face of it, it's rankly pro-business and anti-worker, which is hardly a fucking surprise. But if you peel it back a layer, it's actively stupid and hurts the economy by taking money out of hourly employee's pockets.

The number one driver of economic growth and activity is consumer spending. Not business pending. Consumers. And people who make an hourly wage (as opposed to salaried executives or investors) spend a much greater percentage of their income... which means that for every dollar they take home, that's almost certainly another dollar that's going to be spent (or pay down accrued debts, or otherwise be circulated, and not end up just stuck into an interest-bearing account).

So, please, authors, sponsors, and supporters of HR1406, explain to me how this bill helps workers or the economy without using the term "job providers" or any other cipher meaning "more money goes to the business owners and stockholders, and less goes to the people who actually do the fucking work."

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

The places that will actually benefit from this are both workers and firms doing contract jobs, with defined completion points that may even have bonuses for early completion. Stuff like the construction of roads, dams, houses, ships, etc. It allows the corporation some minor amount of flexibility in cash outlay (which is frequently borrowed money) for labor costs prior to the completion of the project in exchange for paying employees after the project completes or reaches a payment milestone, and the employee can then *have* paid time off at all, in an industry that often doesn't have a cultural provision for that at all.

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

Forgive me if I'm being naive, but I'm not seeing a problem with this. Most hourly workers don't have the opportunity to have paid time off at all, so this is a way to achieve that effective benefit without a formal vacation system in place. I had very similar comp time options at my last employer, but don't at my current one (which is not as big a deal because I'm getting more vacation time than I used to have). Yeah, sometimes the extra money is nice, but sometimes the extra time is more desirable, like if I want to take a long weekend or have some vacation. By this provision, the time also has to be payable at least annually if unused, or within 30 days of a written employee request. Speaking from experience, when you're working a shitty job with a lot of hours, sometimes money stops being effective at mitigating the suck, and a little time off would be preferable.

I'm assuming this legislation wouldn't apply to me anyway, in an exempt employee class, but if it did I'd have the option of comp time again, and that wouldn't suck for me.