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The Working Families Flexibility Act H.R. 1406 passed the House at the beginning of May. The Bill which was put forth by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Rep. Martha Roby would replace overtime pay with comp time. Aside from eliminating overtime income for employees, the Bill would allow management to decide when an employee could take the comp time that they had earned. While the Bill is unlikely to pass the Senate and is not endorsed by the White House, the very fact that it was even drafted reveals the GOP’s intentions of eroding worker’s rights.

In this interview, Thom Hartmann discusses this Bill, the future of the Occupy Movement and other issues facing American workers with Leo Gerard the President of the United Steel Workers Union.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

HARTMANN: I am so pleased to have Leo Gerard, International President of the United Steel Workers Union on the line with us. President Gerard, welcome back! You wrote a piece in which you said, “the GOP has an App for that”, tell me about it.

GERARD: Well the GOP’s got an app for everything!

HARTMANN: This is the Working Families Flexibility Act.

GERARD: Yeah, they are masters of using trick language, but this Bill is to do away with over time and replace it with comp time. And the way that the Bill is written is the way you’d expect it to be written by them. It’s got the ability of the management to replace overtime so if you worked 8 hours you’d replace it with 8 hours off, but the problem is that it does away with time and a half overtime. It would take a big chunk of money out of working folks’ pockets. Then the next piece is that you don’t get to take the day off when you need it, you get to take the day off or part of the day off when they tell you to. So theoretically you could have the boss come in and say, ‘I need you to stay tonight’ so you’d work an overtime shift but you wouldn’t get overtime you’d get 8 hours of comp time. But then the boss could say take 4 hours on Thursday and 4 hours on Friday. I call it forced flexibility.

HARTMANN: So literally the boss could tell you to just take one hour off each one of these following 8 days and you’d have no way of planning around it. Basically workers lose all control over their own schedules.

GERARD: Forced flexibility. And, Thom in real terms, it takes money out of working class people’s pockets. Overtime is something that we’ve had since the 1940s. It came with the 8 hour day. And the thing that’s so disgusting and really disappointing is that for some reason the modern Republican Party seems to have as their agenda the weakening of the standard of living for middle class and working class folks pushing everybody down into poverty.

I was in a debate with some guy the other night. We’re talking about the minimum wage. The President wants to move it from where it is to 9 bucks. So I said, ‘Let’s have a discussion at 10 bucks an hour’. 10 bucks an hour and you work a 40 hour work week and you work a 4 and a half week month, that comes to $1800. Who can live in New York City or Chicago or Pittsburgh or anyplace on 1800 bucks a month? What if you have kids or even if you don’t. And yet, some of that would be overtime they would take away. And, that’s at a minimum wage of $10 not $7.25.

HARTMANN: I mean if you go back to the core of Reaganomics like Russell Kirk’s 1952 book, ‘The Conservative Mind’ which William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan all cited as the bible of modern economic theory. What Kirk was calling for in that book was to destroy the middle class. That the middle class if a large group of people became wealthy enough that they felt relatively independent of their employers. What Russell Kirk was predicting in the 1950s was that if the trends that were coming out of post World War 2 continued, like unionization, then women would eventually start demanding their rights, minorities would start demanding their rights and unions would start getting in the way of business and the profitability of billionaires and even students would start rising up. And, and when all that happened in the 60’s, the Republicans went ‘Aha! I told you so’ and thus, 1980s Reaganomics was born. The Republicans are trying to take us back to 19th century England to Charles Dickens’ world.

GERARD: And put that beside the Lewis Powell memo about the corporate leadership and the already rich and powerful taking control of the political system. You don’t have to like it, but you’ve got to admire the determination of the right wing. They don’t write a six month plan, they don’t have an election and say well it didn’t quite turn out so let’s go back to the drawing board, they’ve been on this agenda for close to 40 years. And now they’re starting to see their dreams coming true and they are our worst nightmares.

I really think it’s people like you Thom and other progressive shows that have to educate the public that we can’t sustain a democracy in this kind of environment. I thought it was fantastic that Elizabeth Warren is going to introduce a bill (although in reality it won’t pass but it’s going to make a hell of a good debate) which says that student loans should get the same interest rates as the Fed gives to big banks. If we can give student loans a .25% interest rate instead of a 4.5%, 5% or 6% interest rate that will help them out. But this helps make the point that they are prepared to bank roll the big banks at .25 but they are not prepared to do that with kids.

HARTMANN: And kids shouldn’t even need to borrow so much. I mean, when Ronald Reagan came into office, about 80% of the total cost of college tuition nation wide was paid for by state, federal, local governments or by the colleges themselves and only 20% was paid for by the students. Now, that’s all flipped upside down and 24% is paid by other agencies and 76% is paid by students.

GERARD: If you look at the countries where we’ve been told to compete with in the manufacturing sector their education systems are more the way it used to be for us. They get lifetime learning for workers, upgrading their skills all the time at very little cost if any. And we don’t even have apprenticeships anymore in our work places.

HARTMANN: Are we seeing the final fulfillment of Reaganomics here? If so, when does it collapse?

GERARD: Look, I think if President Obama’s four year term is going the way that it started off in the last three months or four months we’re going to be in an irrevocable downward skid. And I think the only solution to this is to hopefully take back the House. If we’re talking about doing it democratically then it is to take back the house in 2014.

One of my big disappointments Thom, and I don’t mean this to be a criticism, is that we had a movement that sprung out of frustration which was the Occupy Movement. The problem with the Occupy Movement was that we didn’t ask for anything we just occupied and we fizzed out. If that Occupy Movement could come back to life and many people are trying to help it come back to life like Van Jones, we could stay mobilized. I think we could change the political direction of the country.

The reality is that the Republicans, and you don’t have to like them, but I admire their determination, their stick-to-it-ness and they have an agenda and they are not backing down and they don’t give a damn if the country collapses around them they, they are going to drive their agenda home. I don’t want the country to collapse. I want it to succeed. And so, that means rebuilding infrastructure, putting people back to work, refocusing on manufacturing. I’m not naïve. We’re not going to turn it around in 6 weeks or 6 months, maybe in 6 or 8 years but we’ve got to change the direction. I’m proud of myself and my union for fighting for manufacturing in this country.

There’s an old Chinese saying that I heard a long time ago and I thought it was kind of silly when I first heard it but then I started thinking about it and the saying goes like this, ‘Unless you change direction you will continue in the direction in which you are heading’. The direction we are heading is not good for the working people, it’s not good for the middle class and it’s not good for democracy.

Thom’s Guest: Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers since 2001. He is also a vice president of the AFL-CIO.

Read Leo Gerard’s articles in Huffington Post.

SONALI KOLHATKAR IS ON MATERNITY LEAVE.