Burgess Owens: “We could have total bipartisan cooperation if we really recognized what is at the heart of this controversy at this…”

“We could have total bipartisan cooperation if we really recognized what is at the heart of this controversy at this point. It is money. It is only money; $22,600 a year is not a proper cutoff point. I recognize that the Fair Labor Standards Act is 60 years old. We have made some adjustments in situations where adjustments made sense, but here we are proposing to make an adjustment on the backs of the working families. We are proposing an adjustment which has no logical rationale. Common sense has been thrown out the window. We have a cutoff point of $22,600 a year. We did this same thing for the computer programming industry. They had certain circumstances which made it evident that large amounts of hours were required, and they could not keep paying more and more overtime, but they had a staff of specialized people. They could not go out and get more people because they did not have the skills. We took that into consideration and we amended the 60-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act. And certainly we could work out an amendment now, a bipartisan amendment, if we would just admit the fact that $22,600 a year is not a proper cutoff point.”