COLUMBUS, OHIO ? President Bush on Thursday called on Congress to pass legislation making it easier for employers to offer workers time off instead of overtime pay — an idea that Republicans hope will appeal both to Bush’s core business supporters and to swing voters juggling home and work responsibilities.

The idea is also part of a broader effort to cast key elements of Bush’s domestic agenda as ways to help workers adapt to big changes in the U.S. economy, such as the diminishing number of families with a stay-at-home parent.

“I think the government ought to allow employers to say to an employee, if you want some time off, and work different hours, you’re allowed to do so,” Bush told a crowd of supporters in Ohio, where polls show he is in a dead heat with Democratic nominee John F. Kerry. “Government ought to be helping families.” While Bush cast the proposal in terms designed to appeal to working parents, critics, including Kerry and labor unions, called it a back-door effort to deny workers the overtime pay that many depend on to make ends meet.

“This administration has launched an all-out assault on overtime,” said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., in a conference call arranged by the Kerry campaign.

Despite the broad popularity of flexible work schedules, legislation to promote them has drawn so much opposition that leaders of the Republican-controlled House decided last year not to bring it to a vote.

Nonetheless, Bush has put new emphasis on the issue in his stump speech in the past week as he has come under growing pressure from fellow Republicans to detail his domestic agenda for a second term.

Much of what Bush has put on that agenda so far has been the unfinished business of his first term: making his tax cuts permanent; allowing workers to invest Social Security taxes in personal accounts; providing tax breaks for buying health insurance; and expanding job-training at community colleges.