Legal News

Sizing Up the American Workplace Under an Obama Administration

By Dan Slater

More unions? More paid leave? Tighter anti-discrimination laws?

What designs does President-Elect Barack Obama have for the American workplace? A press release put out today by employment firm Littler Mendelson speculated that employers might have to deal with minimum-wage hikes and increased monitoring of illegal immigrants.

Intrigued, we called up Jay Sumner, a D.C.-based labor partner at the firm. We also lobbed an email to an Obama spokesman. (We have yet to hear back.)

Hi Jay. So what’s one of the first labor law changes we might expect to see under the new administration?

One of the first changes we might see is a softening on unions. Obama is a proponent of several pieces of legislation that make it easier to organize. (For instance, said Sumner, the Employee Free Choice Act.)

Do you think that’ll be good for the economy?

To quote the unions, allowing for easier unionization would be an important aspect to rebuilding the middle class. But there’s an equally compelling argument that the additional cost for businesses is not what the economy needs.

The last time the country was in this situation, during the Great Depression, we got the National Labor Relations Act, which allowed unions to organize private employers. It was also seen as way to build the middle class. Whether it worked or not is subject to debate.

In the run up to the election, some of those who opposed Obama said his policies amounted to socialism.

Well, I don’t if it points to socialism as much as moving more toward a different model of family-work balance.

What might that entail?

Providing people with more paid leave and paid time off so they don’t have to work as much as they do today, including an expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act so that it’ll apply to smaller employers and allow people to take time off for additional reasons, such as for attending to a child’s academic needs, for elder care or for domestic violence.

What’s interesting is that if you look at the way the vote turned out in the Electoral College, the numbers are similar to Clinton’s first term when he came in in 1993. Clinton’s first piece of legislation was the Family and Medical Leave Act. So it’ll be interesting to see if that’s what Obama focuses on first.

That will be interesting to see. Thanks Jay.

Sure, no problem.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 05, 2008 (boomark / email).