National Clothesline

It appears that the new chairman of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee will be Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. In every Congress for the past few years, Senator Kennedy has introduced a bill that would require employers to provide seven days of paid sick leave per year for their employees. In 2007, this bill will undoubtedly surface again.

It is also expected that one of the first acts of the newly-Democractic Congress will be to raise the minimum wage from its current federal level of $5.15 an hour to six or seven dollars. Several states have already raised the state minimum wage above $5.15, and there is some bipartisan support for raising the federal minimum.

If one visits the Democratic Party website, he or she will see numerous party positions in favor of expanding employee rights, mandating employee benefits, and restricting management prerogatives. It is no coincidence that Labor Day is a federal holiday, but there is no officially-designated “Management Day.” It is not politically popular to salute the hard work and sacrifices of corporate managers, small business owners, and people who have gone heavily into debt to keep their businesses afloat.

According to political commentators, the midterm election of 2006 was a national referendum on the President’s handling of the war in Iraq. Unfortunately for employers, that is not the only issue near and dear to some political leaders who benefitted from the antiwar vote. Many of those political leaders, Ted Kennedy among them, are now in a position to push labor legislation that favors employees over business interests.

Getting back to paid sick leave, this is an outgrowth of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which President Clinton signed into law early in his administration granting unpaid time off for serious illness, childbirth, and family care responsibilities. The idea of the FMLA was to prevent an employer from firing an employee who, through no fault of his own, had to miss work for these reasons. I wonder if Congress realized that the FMLA would also be used by unscrupulous employees to manipulate time off. Regardless, the new Congress will certainly see this as an opportunity to change one aspect of the law it found faulty — the lack of paid time off.

The new make-up of Congress will also give organized labor a chance to amend the National Labor Relations Act, which in its opinion has become ineffective in getting employees to form and join unions. Under the Act, employees have the right to vote in secret ballot elections, and employers have the right to campaign against unionization — with some restrictions — in the weeks leading up to the election.

Labor unions have advocated getting rid of the secret ballot election in favor of a procedure called the “card check.” Under the card check process, the union talks employees into joining the union, and when a majority of a company’s employees have signed union membership cards, the union becomes the representative of all the employees.

The new Congress will certainly address immigration issues, especially as they relate to employment. Labor unions have generally opposed loosening immigration laws, claiming that immigrants take jobs away from Americans, while at the same time increasing the number of Spanish-speaking union organizers. Better to have all bases covered, I suppose.

The one area of labor legislation that could hurt employers’ treasuries the most concerns health insurance. Universal health care is a hot political issue, and health care is a very expensive benefit. General Motors spent $6 billion on health care last year. Making health insurance mandatory will come at a great expense, and that expense must be paid by someone, taxpayers or employers. The country can expect some action in the next Congress to expand health care coverage by requiring more employers to provide coverage at some level.

It is unlikely that Civil Rights legislation will be expanded, except in the area of voting rights. Many pro-employee changes to the anti-discrimination laws were made in 1991 under the first President Bush. We could, however, see an attempt to ban sexual preference discrimination.

If Congress does act to expand federal labor and employment laws, I will do my best to report on and explain them here. My instincts tell me that the new Congress will help me write several columns for 2007.