Once again, a bill promoting comp time is being paraded out by congressional Republicans and will be the subject of a hearing in the House this morning. The bill would allow private sector employers to offer comp time at time-and-a-half in lieu of overtime pay when an employee works more than 40 hours in a week. It is being touted by congressional Republicans as a boon to worker flexibility, but do not be fooled—everything the comp time bill purports to provide for workers is actually already available under the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The bill only provides a new employer right to avoid paying workers the overtime they have earned.

Here are a couple scenarios to show workers are never better off under the comp time bill.

First, the easy example: consider the very common case of the low- or moderate-wage workers whose paycheck is not enough for them to make ends meet, and who would always prefer to work extra hours to get extra pay. Under comp time, these workers give up their right to overtime earnings in exchange for future time off. This is not what they need or want and they are unambiguously worse off under comp time than overtime.

But what about a worker who doesn’t need or want the overtime pay and prefers the time—are they better off under the comp time bill than under current law which provides overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week? Nope! At best they are back at neutral.

The table at the end works through a couple scenarios to show the math. What these examples show is that when employers allow workers to take time off when they need it, workers end up exactly the same under comp time as under overtime; comp time doesn’t offer them anything new. But when the employer does not allow workers to take time off when they ask for it, workers are clearly worse off under comp time than overtime in the short run, and possibly worse off under comp time in the long run. Notably, there is nothing in the comp time bill that suggests employers will be more prone to grant time off when the employee needs it than they already are. Under the comp time bill, the employee has to make a formal request to use their comp time, and the terms of denial are so broad that the employer can deny it for essentially any reason—anything the employer claims “unduly disrupts the operations of the employer.”

The below examples also show that under the comp time bill, far from gaining flexibility, workers simply “loan” their time worked to their employer, interest free, until they are granted leave. Further, the employer can hang on to those extra hours for over a year. This means the loan from the worker to her employer can build up if the employer continues not to grant time off and the worker continues to be required to work overtime hours. And if the employer goes out of business before the worker is granted the time off? They are unlikely to be compensated for those extra hours at all.

These examples also show that the Fair Labor Standards Act already allows an employer to grant time off to employees who work overtime. The comp time bill adds nothing for workers but delay and risk.