Mandatory overtime is common in industries such as manufacturing, retail, health care, and emergency services. Mandatory overtime is as it sounds — not something that workers freely choose, but a requirement imposed by employers. In her book, Brigid Schulte explores in detail the harms of overwork, including elevated rates of worker stress, burnout, and workplace injuries and accidents. In addition, overwork takes people away from their families and can put stress on healthy family life. And further, overwork can reduce worker productivity and increase the likelihood of mistakes, creating costs for business. Eliminating taxes on overtime encourages businesses to demand overtime of their workers. In other words, it normalizes overwork. And while reducing taxes on overtime may sound like money in workers’ pockets, employers will keep this tax benefit in mind as they set wages and adjust accordingly. Recognizing the harms of overwork to health and family life, labor unions fought decades ago to establish a 40-hour workweek so workers would have the freedom to enjoy their families and life beyond work. By encouraging overwork, the policy to eliminate tax on overtime pay reduces workers’ freedom.

Similarly encouraging tips as a form of payment reduces worker freedom, as the method leaves workers reliant on the whims of customers. Tipping took root in the US in the wake of slavery, and may have originated as a practice in the feudal caste system of the Middle Ages. It is a practice that explicitly puts the worker in a subservient position to the customer, dependent on their largesse. In addition, a tipped income is often irregular as it is dependent on the amount of business there is in addition to the choices people make about whether and how much they would like to tip. Balancing irregular income against regular monthly bills creates many hardships for workers with low earnings. The growth in reliance on tips by low-paid workers also fatigues consumers who question why they need to tip so much and so often. The unequal relationship between a tipped worker and a customer often results in the workers experiencing harassment or demeaning treatment at work. Indeed the restaurant industry is rife with harassment in part due to the vulnerability of workers who rely on tips. For businesses, however, expanding worker reliance on tips means reducing their labor expense, so again, we have a tax policy masquerading as being good for workers that perpetuates worker unfreedom and offers more benefit to employers.

If Congress truly wants to reduce dependence on public benefits, it should make work pay. Last year over 23 million workers claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit because wages alone could not meet their household’s basic needs. Only 24% of adults in households below twice the poverty line have employer‑provided health insurance. A quarter of workers aged 25‑54 earn low wages, and the country is growing comfortable with the idea of the “working poor” — even the “working homeless.”

How did we allow this in the land of the free? When millions of working people cannot count on a roof overhead or care in times of need, they are not truly free. If the president and Congress care about freedom, they must craft a very different Fourth of July bill — one that confronts economic unfreedoms and completes the work of independence.