House delays vote on comp time for overtime bill.

A proposal on Capitol Hill designed to "improve working conditions for hourly wage earners," including nurses in the nation's long term care facilities, has nurses' unions up in arms.

HR 1119, known as the Family Time Flexibility Act, would allow workers to choose between getting paid and receiving paid time off at the rate of one-and-a-half hours for every hour they work overtime. The proposal came up for a vote in June, but then was tabled by the House for a later date.

The program, available to government employees since the mid-1980s, would allow private-sector workers to bank up to 160 hours of overtime.

Jeff Trexel, media relations director for U.S. Representative Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), who proposed HR 1119, said the bill would allow families more quality time.

The bill's opponents say it will enable employers to force workers to work more overime or favor employees who opt for paid time off over monetary compensation.

"This is a real gimmick being pushed by business interests so that employers can force people to work overtime," said Charles Idelson, spokesperson for Oakland, Calif.-based California Nurses' Association, the state's largest organization for nurses in all fields, including long term care.

The new overtime law would not be in patients' best interests either, Idelson said.

"Caretakers who are working 16 or 24 hours straight without breaks may be putting patients at risk," Idelson said. "Their judgment may be clouded by fatigue, which is really a prescription for disaster in the health care setting."

Ellen Bravo, director of Milwaukee-based 9 to 5 National Association of Working Women, a national lobbying group, said employers already have the option to give workers paid time off.

"This is going to increase the likelihood of employees having to work overtime and [will] actually take time away from families," Bravo said.

Ed O'Neil, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, sees pros and cons with HR1119.

"There's a lot of push and pull with overtime in the nursing industry," O'Neil said. "Employers [often] push employees into overtime, but at the same time there's an enormous amount of pull for elective overtime."