Just in time for Mother's Day this year, President Obama has threatened a veto on a bill that would be of great benefit to working moms throughout the country.
In the May 11-12 edition of the Wall Street Journal, the editorial board took Mr. Obama to task for pledging to kill a bill that would reform the Fair Labor Standards Act "to allow employees to swap overtime pay for compensatory time off." The bill, "[s]ponsored by Alabama Republican (and mother of two young children) Martha Roby," passed the House last week. If signed into law, it would give private sector non-union employees the sort of flexibility that federal government employees have had since 1985.
So what's the president's hangup? Well, even though "[p]olls show working mothers are eager for this kind of flexibility, since it lets them adjust their busy schedules for school-age children or aging parents," the president is more concerned with the special interest that labor unions have in the matter.
"The politics at play here is White House fealty to unions. The only way for many private workers to obtain flex-time is if a union negotiates it as part of a collective-bargaining agreement," the Journal's editorial board explained. Naturally, "if workers can negotiate overtime pay for flexible work hours on their own, they have on less reason to join a union and pay the dues that fund Democratic campaigns."
You most likely haven't heard about this development in large part because of other major news events -- the Cleveland kidnappings, the Jodi Arias trial, etc. -- taking up all the oxygen in the news cycle. That being said, even if there weren't other major news developments vying for media attention, it's hard to believe the liberal media would have devoted significant attention to this matter, precisely because it falls outside the "war on women" meme which paints the president as a knight in shining armor and the GOP as retrograde ogres.
