Choices are bad

     In at least seven states including Nevada, the AFL-CIO -- America's largest trade union organization -- is now airing ads, urging voters to contact their swing-vote Democratic senators and oppose a new federal law which would allow workers to choose "comp time" off in lieu of overtime pay.
      The AFL-CIO ad campaign pictures a "huckster" calling the bill "another amazing trick" that would supposedly gut a worker's right to overtime pay at the behest of big corporations.
      "They say the choice will be up to us," the union pitchman says. "But there are no real safeguards to keep employers from pressuring workers to accept time off, or tell them when to take it."
      Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., replied Tuesday that those assertions are false, noting that any comp time arrangement is entirely voluntary and that the bill sets out stiff penalties for any type of employer coercion.
      "Contrary to your ad, the bill guts no existing law. It imposes nothing on anyone," Sen. Ashcroft and a dozen other GOP senators said in a rapidly-fired-off response to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
      In fact -- though apparently it would be a surprise to the blindered us-vs.-them crowd at the nation's union headquarters -- it is the current mandated overtime system that stymies the wishes and job fulfillment of many a worker.
      For the mandate that employers must pay time-and-a-half after 40 hours does not always result in more pay, of course. Many a worker not accustomed to the "union shop" has been shocked to find a supervisor or union steward stopping by his work station at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon to announce, "That's it. You just hit 40 hours, and no overtime is authorized on this job. Go home."
      "But this job has to be finished today," the earnest worker may protest, to no avail.
      "No problem, we'll have someone else slap it together. True, it won't be as nice as what you could have done. But who cares? That's all this greedy management deserves."
      Is this the system which we believe will restore Americans' pride in their own workmanship, their satisfaction in their jobs, and the reputation of America's goods in the world market?
      Many is the worker who would rather work a long week when there are a lot of contracts or customers in the shop, and be rewarded with an extra three-day weekend, instead of an extra $100 in the paycheck.
      Why shouldn't workers have this choice?
      Yes, any system can be abused. But the best solution to that is to create a freer market in labor, so that employers not operating in good faith are hurt by workers either voting with their feet or not producing.
      Instead, the nation's leading unions insist that the Great Nanny in Washington peer down into our stores and casinos and offices, bothering itself with what a previously happy and satisfied worker may or may not do between 2 and 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.
      The proposed reform is really a very minor one, restoring only a small measure of the "freedom of contract" which worker and employer would best be left to exercise for themselves.
      On Thursday afternoon, the GOP majority could not find even five Democratic senators to join with them in cutting off debate and moving to enact this little ... this tiny bit ... of restored worker freedom.
      We hope Nevada Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan will be among those who, in the end, decide to place the freedom of individual Nevada workers above the we-know-best party line of the union bosses.