“Comp time” encourages mandatory overtime – and ends overtime pay as we know it. Instead of time-and-a-half pay for hours worked past 40, workers would get “comp time,” hours of time off to be taken later. Employers benefit because they don’t have to pay overtime, plus, they can have you use your comp time in a way that won’t cost them extra (during less busy periods, etc.). According to the bill, individual employees have the “choice” between comp time or overtime pay. Since comp time saves the employer money, what is stopping them from inducing workers, subtly or not, into choosing comp time? They could give the “comp time” workers better shifts and better treatment, and they could even train workers not to take the overtime options – in the same way that Target and other stores train workers not to join unions.

Part of Eric Cantor's big Republican rebranding agenda is to pass the Working Families Flexibility Act, which would let employers replace paying time and a half for overtime hours worked with offering comp time. Of course, it's branded as offering workers more choice. But there are a few problems with that. Working America's Doug Foote counts seven. For instance:Workers could also end the year not having used all their comp time (especially if their bosses make it difficult to schedule) and lose it. And don't forget—no one would get that comp time until they'd worked overtime and not been paid as much for it as they would be now. Women would likely bit hit especially hard by this law, since they tend to bear more of the workload at home and more responsibility for children.

In fact, time issues are one reason for occupational segregation, a new study finds. Sarah Jaffe explains that Indiana University's Youngjoo Cha:



[...] found that 6.8 percent of the mothers surveyed who worked 50 hours a week or more in male-dominated fields ended up exiting those jobs within four months, compared to 4.3 percent of women without children. (The percentage of men leaving those professions was just slightly over 2 percent, whether they had children or not.) Having children, the report notes, increases the odds of a woman leaving a male-dominated field where she is expected to work 50 hours or more by 52 percent. Cha explains to Working in These Times that women who have care-giving responsibilities at home are less likely to be able to work all day long, and care work is still seen as a woman’s job—in her paper, Cha cites a 2012 study that found that even women who make more money than their spouses spend 30 percent more time with their children. Yet male-dominated occupations—which still, Cha notes, pay more than female-dominated ones—demand long hours of workers. Fields like law or medicine expect total commitment, and even skilled blue-collar jobs tend to require longer work hours and lots of overtime. The expectation that workers will be able to stay on the job longer, combined with the expectation that women will do most of the care-giving, leads to more women leaving those male-dominated fields, either exiting the labor force entirely or finding a job that doesn't have the same kinds of demands.

Time is an intensely political issue, though it's not always recognized as such. Eric Cantor is recognizing that—and, true to form, trying to give employers more power over workers' lives.