Tom Harkin: “we have some good news. The House of Representatives just a little while ago passed, by a substantial margin, a motion…”

“we have some good news. The House of Representatives just a little while ago passed, by a substantial margin, a motion to instruct their conferees to adhere to the Senate's position saying that the administration cannot go ahead to implement the rules on overtime which would take away overtime pay protection for over 8 million Americans. The vote in the House was 221 to 203. This is a great victory for American workers today. It sends a very clear message to the administration: Don't mess with overtime pay protection. Don't take away from American workers the overtime pay protection that we have had in the law since 1938. This is a clear and unequivocal message from both the House and the Senate. I hope the administration has the message. I now call upon the Secretary of Labor to forthwith, today, by sundown tomorrow, go ahead and extend overtime pay protections to hundreds of thousands of Americans on the low-income side of the scale. Right now, the low-income threshold is $8,060 a year. Part of the proposal the administration sent down would have raised that level to $21,100 a year. This is an issue on which we all agree. This is something the Secretary of Labor can do today, tomorrow, before the week is out. This can be done with a stroke of a pen. I call upon the Secretary of Labor to immediately issue a new regulation that would raise the low-income threshold from $8,060 to $21,100 a year and thus cover many more Americans with overtime pay protection.”