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U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao
Women's Bar
Association of the District of Columbia
2001 Annual Dinner
National
Building Museum
Washington, D.C.
May 22, 2001
Good evening, and thank you for that warm welcome. It is
such an honor for me to be here tonight, and to be given the opportunity to
speak to you.
And I'm humbled to be in the company of tonight's honorees,
Wilma Lewis and Judge Ridgeway.
People are often surprised to find out that the Department
of Labor has had more women Secretaries than any other Cabinet-level
agency.
And one of the first offices within the Department was an
office created by Congress in 1920 to address the concerns of working families.
That organization was, and still is today, the Women's
Bureau.
In fact, I'm pleased to have with me tonight the first
Asian-Pacific American woman ever to head the Women's Bureau, Shinae Chun.
Shinae, would you please stand?
I raise these points tonight because I don't think it
should be surprising that women have played such a central role in the history
of the Department of Labor.
The truth is, women have always worked, regardless of
whether they were compensated for it. And in this century particularly, women
have joined the commercial workforce in greater numbers than ever.
Women aren't just entering the workforce, they are staying
there longer than at any time before. That's another huge change we have
witnessed just in the last few decades.
Women are also the ones, usually, who have to deal head-on
with the difficult balance between work and family. As a result, women are
acutely aware of the inseparable, and sometimes challenging, connection between
work and home.
So I think it's fitting that women have played such a vital
role in the Department of Labor because this Department isn't just about jobs,
it's about how our work connects with the rest of our lives.
In my new job, people often ask me, what should the
Department of Labor be doing?
I was at an appropriations hearing this afternoon, going
over our budget.
The Department of Labor is a "small" agency — we only
have slots for seventeen thousand employees and a modest budget of 44.4 billion
dollars. I should point out that's up from 39.2 billion dollars the year
before.
I told the committee what I thought the Department of Labor
should deliver in exchange for all this money we are receiving from the
taxpayers.
We can talk about programs and regulations, but the bottom
line is, what I think this department can offer people, more than anything
else, is hope.
We offer hope to workers who have been laid off, by getting
them training that will help them find work with a new employer, or an entirely
new career.
We offer hope to those who have been denied a job or a
promotion because of persistent prejudice on the basis of race, color, gender
or religion.
I'm especially excited about the fact that we are about to
offer a new horizon of hope to disabled Americans who want to join the economic
mainstream, by helping to carry out the President's New Freedom Initiative.
This Initiative isn't just about giving disabled people the
latest work-enabling technologies, it's about giving them equal access to the
American Dream.
So we have a mission of hope at the Department of Labor,
and I have a message of hope for all of you tonight.
Even with all the challenges and obstacles that women in
the workplace face today, I believe there hasn't been a better time to be a
working woman since the days of Rosie the Riveter.
One of the reasons is obvious: Not since the Second World
War has there been such a great demand for workers — a demand that has
drawn more women than ever before into full-time work, including positions and
careers that were once walled off to women.
This phenomenon will only increase in the coming decades,
as the baby boomers reach retirement age.
It's hard to imagine, but you may have read in the news
that Bob Dylan is going to turn 60 on Thursday. If that doesn't make you feel
old, I don't know what will.
But the point is: Massive numbers of workers —
including many in the top echelons of business, law and government — are
getting ready to retire. And right now, there aren't enough workers to replace
them.
America faces what I have called the "incredible shrinking
workforce" — and that means that women are going to be in a stronger and
stronger bargaining position to get the jobs they want, at the salary they
want, on the terms they want.
The new economy that has been created in the last decade
also puts a premium on skilled workers.
If you've ever read Peter Drucker, you're familiar with the
term "knowledge workers." Right now, even with the recent drop among the
dot-coms, the U.S. economy needs more knowledge workers than are currently
available — and that gap will only increase in the future.
The result is that employers are going to greater lengths
to find skilled employees, and even more importantly, to do whatever it takes
to keep them.
Increasingly, women are becoming empowered to negotiate for
more flexibility in their work to accommodate other life needs.
Technology itself is paving the way for more flexible,
custom-fit work arrangements.
An office used to be a building filled with employees, a
cafeteria and a water cooler. Now it is an airplane seat — or a desk in
the kitchen — and a laptop with a modem. Before long, an office will be
nothing more than a cell phone and a Blackberry.
These technological advances can help us custom-fit our
work into the rest of our lives, but as most of you have probably experienced,
they are double-edged swords.
As anyone who lives with a cell phone or a beeper knows,
being "connected" means you never truly leave the office. The old, stark
division between work and home has blurred, and it will continue to blur in the
future.
At the Department of Labor, we're still trying to figure
out how the 40-hour workweek fits into the 21st century reality of a 24/7
economy.
But the bigger challenge is to make new technologies work
for us, rather than the other way around…to use innovations like
telecommuting and tele-work to give employees more options and more control
over their time.
You all know the old expression that "time is money." I
don't happen to agree with that statement, and I don't think most of you do,
either. We know that time is actually more important than money.
We can always make more money, but we can't make more
time.
This is a crucial issue for women in the workplace —
and it's already starting to exert a seismic impact on the workplace itself.
In many cases — I'm excited to report — women are
leading the way. Consider what Andrea Jung, the president of Avon, recently
said:
"I used to say, 'I'm going to an outside meeting,' if I
went to a pediatrician. Now I feel zero guilt if I say, 'I'm going to a school
play.' I think it gives the women with children who work here the freedom
— because it all starts from the top — to feel like there are moments
that family comes first, and that's not only O.K., it's important."
The good news is that people like Andrea Jung, and
companies like Avon, are the future of the American workplace.
The bad news is that the future isn't here yet for many
employers.
And truthfully, this bright future we're talking about is
still a long way off for women at the other end of the economic spectrum —
who simply don't have the bargaining power and the options that most of us in
this room have.
That just means we need to keep at it. So the message I
have for you tonight is not only that we should have hope, but also that we
need perseverance.
For example, I applaud the efforts of the Women's Bar
Association to promote flexible workplaces, including the work you have done on
the Project for Attorney Retention — which is making the economic case for
adopting flexible work arrangements in order to retain valuable employees.
In this same vein, I want to highlight an accomplishment of
one my predecessors at the Department of Labor, former Labor Secretary
Elizabeth Dole.
Many of you will remember that she raised an issue called
the "glass ceiling," whereby qualified women were notably under-represented
among the highest levels of corporate leadership.
Today, we still have a glass ceiling, but it is a porous
glass ceiling. Slowly but surely, we are making progress.
We are beginning to see more and more women as CEOs, CFOs,
and members of corporate boards, all because of what Secretary Dole
started.
It's important to note that this took place in the last ten
years — not because of some new regulation or new law enacted by Congress.
It happened because Secretary Dole and her successor, Secretary Lynn Martin,
started talking about it.
They began a dialogue with corporate America. They pointed
out that it just didn't make bottom-line sense to exclude qualified women from
the top ranks of their companies.
What's more, they assumed that at least some in corporate
America would respond in good faith. I think that's a crucial element that
shouldn't be passed over lightly.
The conventional model for effecting change in Washington
is command-and-control. I don't trust you; you don't trust me — so do
exactly what I tell you, or I (meaning the government) will force you to do
it.
To me, it is exhilarating that two women Secretaries of
Labor — first Secretary Dole and then Secretary Martin — changed the
paradigm for getting something done in Washington. They didn't start out with a
legislative plan, or a new regulatory framework — they began with a
dialogue.
That's not to say we have solved the problem — far
from it.
There are plenty of problems that require a regulatory or
legislative response. Not everyone acts in good faith, and not everyone agrees
on the right approach.
My only point is this: When it comes to addressing problems
— including the challenges of the 21st century workplace — women have
added another tool to the toolbox: the tool of constructive dialogue to
identify common interests and hopefully a common solution.
This is part of what President Bush means when he talks
about "changing the tone" in Washington.
For years now, our national government has been stuck in
partisan trench warfare. The President believes there's another way —
where we can disagree without being disagreeable — keeping the channels of
communication open, until we eventually find common ground.
What does that mean for the Department of Labor? It means
that we're going to listen to all points of view.
We're going to try to find the areas of commonality among
the widely divergent constituencies we serve.
A month from now, on June 20th, we're going to have a
ground-breaking Summit on the 21st Century Workforce at the MCI Arena.
We will have a number of exciting speakers, some you've
heard of before, and some you've never heard of — but whose stories are
tremendously compelling.
We'll be focusing on the issues I've mentioned tonight
— issues that matter to most of you and to most working Americans, women
and men.
I hope you will come and participate, and I hope you will
continue to share your thoughts with me about how we can best serve and equip
America's 21st Century Workforce.
Thank you.
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