Empowering Employer Child and Elder Care Solutions Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TAKANO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is yet another effort to chip away at the protections guaranteed at the Federal level and take money out of the American worker's pocket.

The concept of overtime is very simple. If you work more than your traditional 40 hours a week, then you make more money, and you get to take home what you earn.

Now, instead of protecting that very basic principle, my Republican colleagues are trying to make it easier for employers to pay their workers less for working more. They want to pay workers less for working more. This bill would exclude child and dependent care from the rate of pay used to calculate a worker's overtime pay. In other words, this bill makes it permissible to pay workers less than their regular rate if they picked up an extra shift.

Taking on extra work doesn't mean you don't need someone to watch your kids, and it shouldn't cost you a benefit that you are entitled to.

Despite the misleading title, this bill cheapens the value of an employee's overtime labor. The overtime salary threshold is already far too low. When the first Trump administration set the current threshold, 8.2 million Americans saw their overtime protections just vanish, and even those eligible employees earning $36,000 a year were making too much money to qualify for overtime pay.

Mr. Speaker, imagine making $36,000 a year and that would disqualify you from being able to get overtime pay. You have no right to it.

Childcare and dependent care assistance should be more accessible and far more affordable for working families, but this Republican proposal merely incentivizing employers to provide assistance will not solve that issue and cutting down already low levels of overtime pay will not do that either.

Right now, working families are watching their access to basic support services shrink before their eyes. Head Start has seen five of their regional offices across the country abruptly closed. Medicaid could face over $800 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. These lifelines that working families depend on for affordable support services are rapidly diminishing, largely due to this administration and this majority's attack on these lifelines as ``waste.''

The resources that working families need are not waste. The tools for economic survival are not waste. Americans deserve better.

Mr. Speaker, I oppose this bill, and I urge my colleagues to oppose it as well.

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