National Clothesline

I just finished reading Bill Bryson’s book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir.

Bryson tells of his upbringing in Des Moines, IA, in the ’50s and ’60s. I am only one year younger than Bryson, so the book was like a trip back to my own childhood.

Life has certainly changed since the 1950s. Children no longer play outside from dawn to dusk, ride in cars without seatbelts or car seats, or practice getting under their desks in school in case we are attacked by the Russians with nuclear bombs. The workplace has changed as well since the ’50s, in some ways better, but in many ways worse. Here are a few examples.

The biggest change in how the workplace operates is due to anti-discrimination laws. In 1964, race, sex, religious, color, and national origin discrimination were barred as reasons for workplace decisions. The legislatures and the courts have since expanded the coverage of these anti-discrimination laws to all kinds of conditions and situations, such as age, disability, sexual preference, and marital status. Now employers are more careful before firing or failing to hire a person. That ’s a good thing.

By the same token, employers are now more timid about making personnel decisions for fear of being sued. They are paralyzed to act because they are afraid of the cost of litigation. The law of the workplace has become so complicated that supervisors need more training on employee relations than manufacturing processes. That is probably a bad thing.

Before the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970, it was not unusual to see construction workers without safety belts, hard hats, and eye protection. I suppose the workplace is safer now, but there are also hundreds of safety regulations that bear no serious relationship to safety. Innovation is frequently stifled in the safety area because current regulations were not designed to deal with technological advances in machinery or construction techniques.

In many ways, however, the workplace is not as safe. Workplace violence is on the increase. Employers, trained under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, spend more money on complying with OSHA regulations than actually trying to figure out safer ways of doing things. After all, isn ’t the goal to avoid OSHA fines? We should make safety the goal again.

When I got my first job in 1967, the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour, I got a pay envelope once a week filled with cash and coins, and I did not have to produce proof of citizenship. There is still a minimum wage, but many states are adopting rates higher than the federal government. Direct deposit predominates now, and foreign-born applicants and employees are a problem. Employers have to fill out I-9's to ensure that they are not hiring illegal aliens. When I was hired in 1967, no one cared that I was born in Panama in a military hospital. Today, I would need my passport or the citizenship papers showing that I was born an American.

When I first started practicing law, we used carbon paper. There was, at most, one computer in the place used for accounting. There used to be limitations on the use of the fax machine. FedEx was the only overnight mail service, and that did not start until the late ’70s. Today, we have e-mail, Internet, and countless ways for employees to waste time at the computer.

The result of increased technology in the workplace has brought an increase in the amount of evidence that can be used against employers in lawsuits. In the ’50s, there might be one written document, if the supervisor had a secretary with a typewriter, relevant to the decision to terminate an employee. Today, there are dozens of e-mails, written memos, and other documents generated directly from the the supervisor’s or the employee’s computer. While these e-mails, memos, and other files can be helpful, they frequently make defending lawsuits more difficult and complicated.

It is impossible to go back. Innovation and progress have unintended consequences. Positive changes in the law will eventually be manipulated by bad employees in ways lawmakers never contemplated. That does not mean, however, that these laws are unnecessary. Employers just need to do what good employers have been doing for years: reward good work and treat their employees fairly.

Good sense never changes.