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Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao
Remarks to the
Labor and Employment Section of
The American Bar Association
August 6,
2001
I am glad to be here with you today, and look forward to
accomplishing great things — with your advice and counsel — for
America's working men and women.
As I'm sure all of you know, the New Economy is changing
how Americans work, where they work, what they expect from work, and what they
want when they retire.
The only thing that hasn't changed very much is how the
federal government protects and empowers workers in this dramatically new
environment.
Let me outline some of the changes affecting our workforce,
and how Washington needs to respond to make a positive difference for the
workforce of the 21st century.
It used to be that the number-one labor problem in America
was unemployment.
Even now, of course, we are worried about people who are
unemployed, and we have a number of programs designed to help those who have
lost their jobs find new ones.
But the most difficult problem facing our workforce today
is not unemployment per se, but the skills gap that exists between new jobs
that are being created and the skill level of many job seekers.
The largest single budget item at the Department of Labor
is for the workforce training programs of the Employment Training
Administration: $10.496 billion - not that I'm counting or anything.
It's my responsibility as Secretary of Labor to make sure
those funds are spent effectively to bridge the skills gap: helping workers
make the transition into the New Economy, and providing skilled workers who can
continue the growth and increased productivity that have benefited this
country.
But that still won't solve the other challenge I mentioned:
a demographic destiny that will leave us with a ballooning class of retirees
— all relying on costly entitlement programs — and a shrinking class
of active workers who are paying the taxes to fund those programs.
One answer to this challenge is to expand our workforce by
reaching out to those who have been left on the sidelines: older workers,
disabled Americans, and the economically disadvantaged. Opening the doors of
opportunity to all used to be a moral imperative, but it is fast becoming an
economic one as well.
Some businesses are already responding. Nearly 2,500
companies are working to bring assistive technologies to Americans with
disabilities. These businesses recognize that disabled workers can become some
of the one and a half million Internet technology professionals needed in the
next five years.
At the Department, we recognize such foresight with
something we call the EVE award - the Exemplary Volunteer Efforts award. Each
year, we present this award to contractors who have demonstrated outstanding
efforts to increase the employment opportunities of those traditionally left
out of America's workforce.
If we are going to prepare and protect our workers for the
challenges of the 21st century, I believe we need to foster more of the vision
and leadership exemplified by the EVE awards.
Traditional, command-and-control government action is
becoming less relevant in an era where the number of adults who work entirely
from their homes has grown by a third in the last ten years.
Consider the challenge of workplace regulation when the
workplace of today may be nothing more than a laptop, a Blackberry, and an
airline seat.
Instead, we need to promote leadership and responsibility,
showing people why we set certain standards, what those standards are, and how
they can live up to them.
Some people have suggested that we are "easing" enforcement
"in favor" of compliance. They are dead wrong. Instead, we recognize a critical
fact of the 21st century economy: that compliance assistance is a tool in the
toolbox of enforcement strategy.
In other words, compliance assistance isn't an alternative
to enforcement; it is a means toward more effective enforcement.
In an age of rapid economic change and highly technical
government regulation, workers and employers alike need clear information on
how to comply with our laws.
Government should offer a helping hand to those who want to
do the right thing, not just a heavy hand that distrusts the basically good
intentions of most people.
Moreover, government simply doesn't have the resources to
ensure safe, healthy, and fair workplaces on its own. At current funding
levels, the federal government can inspect each workplace only once every 167
years.
Even if we did have the resources, we still couldn't
enforce every rule and regulation on the books. And that presumes, of course,
that government has all the answers, at a time when increasing complexity and
continuous change make all of us wrong at some point.
That's the reason for our compliance initiative — to
work with employers and employees; to gain their perspectives on how to achieve
the goals we have set.
We all know what we want: safer, healthier workplaces.
Equal access and promotional opportunities for all. An honest day's pay for an
honest day's work. Financially sound retirement plans.
But rather than march in and dictate how these goals will
be met, we need to take a cue from the private sector and "listen to our
customers."
That's why I decided to begin our re-evaluation of the
ergonomics issue with a series of three information-gathering forums, spread
across the country.
At those forums, we heard from representatives of
organized labor, business, the non-profit sector, social service entities, and
the medical community. Unions in particular made up over a third of the total
witnesses who participated.
The reason for having these forums was that I sincerely
wanted to know what workers and employers and medical experts and service
providers all thought about ergonomics problems and the appropriate
solutions.
I received the presentations with an open mind, and as a
result, I found the exercise to be absolutely invaluable.
What amazed me, however, was that some people were
offended, and even outraged, that we held these forums outside of Washington
— where the fount of all wisdom resides.
They were also extremely agitated that we would want to
hear from the very people who would have to comply with whatever approach we
adopted.
Yet isn't that exactly what we should be doing?
Too often, government regulations are a complex maze that
frustrates compliance instead of encouraging it. In some cases, one agency's
standards and definitions may completely contradict those used by another
regulatory agency.
In such cases, the onus should be on the government to
make its expectations clear before taking punitive action.
It's an ancient principle of jurisprudence that "Ignorance
of the law is no excuse." But that was before the Federal Register filled up
entire libraries, and before most regulations required a J.D. degree and
expertise in the Administrative Procedures Act to figure out.
When we go after employers for violating regulations they
never knew existed, especially when those regulations don't serve an obvious
purpose, then the failure is on our end, not on the employer's.
But let me be clear about what I am saying here: the
necessity to inform and educate and encourage compliance is not our duty to
employers — it's our duty to the workers we are supposed to protect.
If we fail to educate employers as a predicate to
enforcement, it's the workers who suffer — because we'll never catch every
labor law violation.
If we don't work with employers to help them achieve
compliance on the front end, it's the workers who will pay the price.
That's why I'm directing my senior staff to develop a more
effective compliance strategy for our Department, agency by agency.
We need to take the best of what OSHA and OFCCP and Wage
and Hour have done with compliance assistance, and apply it across the board.
Instead of loading up employers with endless surveys and
record-keeping requirements, we need to use the medium of the Internet to offer
directed compliance courses to help employers make their workplaces safe and
fair.
Another area of concern that urgently needs compliance
assistance is pension security. I inherited a number of cases where union
members aren't going to get the full retirement benefits they were promised,
because of financial mismanagement by their own trustees.
In many cases, we will never make these pensioners
completely whole again. But at least we can prevent such financial disasters
from happening in the future, through compliance assistance and better
oversight.
That's what compliance assistance is all about: helping
people. Helping employers live up to common-sense standards of safety and
fairness. Helping workers know what their rights are, as employees and members
of unions. Helping companies as well as unions maintain their pension funds in
good financial order.
If people refuse to comply with our laws and regulations,
then we need to enforce them aggressively. If we have reason to believe that a
particular industry is abusing its workers through willful non-compliance, then
we need to go after them with targeted enforcement initiatives.
But we need to do our part first, to make sure our laws and
regulations are clear and well understood by the regulated community. We need
to give employers, workers and unions a compliance roadmap that is easy to
understand, easy to measure, and as easy as possible to implement.
Thank you.
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