COLUMBUS, Ohio — President Bush called on Congress on Thursday to pass legislation making it easier for employers to offer workers time off instead of overtime pay -- an idea Republicans hope will appeal both to Bush's core business supporters and to swing voters juggling home and work responsibilities.
The idea is also part of a broader effort to cast key elements of Bush's domestic agenda as ways to help workers adapt to major changes in the U.S. economy, such as the diminishing number of families with a stay-at-home parent.
"I think the government ought to allow employers to say to an employee, 'If you want some time off, and work different hours, you're allowed to do so,' " Bush told a crowd of supporters in Ohio, where polls show he is in a dead heat with Democratic nominee Sen. John F. Kerry. "Government ought to be helping families."
Although Bush cast the proposal in terms designed to appeal to working parents, critics -- including Kerry and labor unions -- called it a backdoor effort to deny workers the overtime pay that many depend on to make ends meet.
"This administration has launched an all-out assault on overtime," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a conference call arranged by the Kerry campaign.
Despite the broad popularity of flexible work schedules, legislation to promote them has drawn so much opposition that leaders of the Republican-controlled House decided last year not to bring it to a vote.
Nonetheless, Bush has put new emphasis on the issue in his campaign speeches in the last week as he has come under growing pressure from fellow Republicans to detail his domestic agenda for a second term.
Like the flextime proposal, which Bush has supported for several years, much of what he has put on that agenda so far has been the unfinished business of his first term: making his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent; allowing workers to invest part of their Social Security payroll taxes in personal retirement accounts; providing tax breaks for the purchase of health insurance; and expanding job-training programs at community colleges.
But in pitching those policies, Bush lately has been putting them in a broader context. He argues that many existing health, labor and pension policies are outmoded because of significant changes in the economy over the last generation, including the increase in families where both parents are working. The White House says that in 2002, nearly two-thirds of married mothers with children younger than 6 were working.
