Hauling Labor Law Into the Next Century; White House Report Likely to Start Bitter, Lengthy Fight Over Updating '30s-Era Reforms
A special White House commission issued a report on labor relations yesterday that the Clinton administration will use to try to update labor laws so that they fit the diverse work force of the 1990s.</br></br>The fact-finding report by the 10-member Commission for the Future of Worker/Management Relations will serve as the starting point for what promises to be a bitter and lengthy legislative fight over reforming labor laws that date back to the Great Depression.</br></br>Unlike the U.S. work force of the past six decades, the report said today's workers are "more educated; more female, often part of a two-earner family; more likely to be members of a minority group; and getting older as the baby boomers age." This, it said, "poses challenges to the traditional modes of compensation and organization of work schedules and makes provisions of equal opportunity for all increasingly critical to our economic success."</br></br>Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich called the report "an attempt to begin the process of dialogue." Reich said the question that has to be answered is whether the current system of laws governing the workplace is "appropriate to the times...</br></br>"The American workplace has undergone extraordinary transformation over the last six decades and will be evolving still more dramatically in the future," he said. "But our legal framework and many of our notions about worker-management relations were made for a 1930s world - not the 21st century."