For bill supporters, the legislation's merits are obvious. It allows employers to both save money and offer employees something that they often want: more vacation.

Skeptics, however, argue the bill is a way for employers to avoid properly compensating their employees for long hours.

Mandatory time-and-a-half overtime wages were designed in part as a way to dissuade employers from forcing employees to work more than 40 hours a week. The more options employers are given to make employees go overtime, the more common overtime work may become, some say.

"By making it possible for employers not to pay for overtime, this bill instead provides an incentive to require long hours," writes Ellen Bravo, co-director of Working Families @ Work, in a Huffington Post article.

In addition, the legislation allows employers broad power to deny a request from an employee to use some of their accrued comp time. The employer can say that the time off requested would "unduly disrupt" business. That means that a worker who hopes to take comp time to care for a sick child might not be able to do so, says Bravo.

Furthermore, argues Ross Eisenbrey, vice-president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think-tank, if employers want to offer workers time off in recognition of long hours, they can do so under the current legal framework:

"The employer simply pays for the overtime when it's worked and then gives the employee unpaid time off when the employee requests it. The employee gets the money first and the leave later," Eisenbrey writes in a column for The Hill.

Of course, that requires employers to sacrifice both money and labor, whereas the proposed bill would allow them to only sacrifice one.

It's unclear whether the bill has much of a chance of passing. So far it only has two co-sponsors, both of whom are very conservative Republicans.