Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich often is a headliner at Washington conferences. His draw is not just his hefty “formerly” title but also his skill at making policy entertaining—no mean feat in a city full of sharp people who nevertheless can lose their audience in the weeds of legislative and regulatory detail.

Gingrich was at his big-picture best as the keynote speaker at the National Association of Workforce Boards Forum on Monday, February 25. He called training crucial to economic growth because it creates “engaged” and productive workers who can compete with India and China.

“If we cannot train the American workforce and we cannot have the most dynamic economy in the world, we will no longer be the leading country in the world,” Gingrich said.

He recommended that individualized training take place regularly over a worker’s lifetime. It should be largely carried out over the Internet rather than in classrooms and adapted to cultures and languages. It must be a flexible and agile system because there’s no way to predict what the U.S. workforce will need in a few years—say, 2015.

“We’ll be lucky to know that in 2014,” he said.

Gingrich’s message was well-received, even though he criticized community colleges— and the rest of academia— as being the wrong institution to provide leadership in changing the U.S. workforce training system because it is too sclerotic.

It was likely that many in the audience represent community colleges on local Workforce Investment Boards, the public-private entities that manage the approximately $3 billion federal training system.

Nonetheless, Gingrich received a standing ovation at the end of his presentation—in part because he offered to be a bridge from the group to Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.

Even though McCain, the Republican front-runner for president, has addressed training issues on the campaign trail, he is viewed with some suspicion by workforce boards. Training funds have tended to take a hit when McCain launches his budget-cutting offensives.

But the current Democratic majorities in Congress aren’t exactly raising the training flag. Last year during the appropriations process, no House member put Workforce Investment Act funding in the top 10 of his or her priorities in letters to the appropriations committee, according to David Bradley, CEO of USA Works.

The Democratic Congress restored about $1 billion in cuts that the Bush administration proposed for training, but it acquiesced to a $250 million rescission in Workforce Investment Act programs.

It’s more of the same in the Bush budget this year, which calls for about a $1 billion cut in training programs. The president has said that he will not accept any discretionary domestic spending above the limits he has set.

Last year, even Republicans who pledge to support workforce funding increases stood with the president when he vetoed a bill that would put more money into the Department of Labor’s budget.

“They can’t have it both ways,” Bradley said.

With partisanship rising to even higher levels than normal in the midst of a presidential campaign, gridlock is likely to impede this year’s budget process. So, advocates are going to play defense.

The message they should send to Congress, Bradley said: “No cuts, period, on workforce.”
 
Broader reform of the Workforce Investment Act has languished. Congress has not reauthorized the law since 2003. Democratic leaders have indicated it will not happen this year either, according to Bradley.

Among the reasons: A Republican push for faith-based delivery of training programs, Democratic desires to wait for a Democratic presidential administration, and objections from organized labor. In addition, there’s little time available on the congressional calendar.

Meanwhile, employers in several parts of the country—including Wisconsin, Ohio, Arkansas, Washington state and Kentucky—are collaborating with government and educational institutions through an initiative called “career pathways” to develop training programs to produce workers they need in manufacturing, health care and other sectors.

“Washington [D.C.] needs to learn from the examples of states,” said Julian Alssid, executive director of the Workforce Strategy Center. “Most people in the country don’t realize there are resources that can help them in their search for new and better jobs.”

An emphasis by Gingrich’s former colleagues on Capitol Hill and by the presidential candidates could do a great deal to raise the urgency of the issue.

Employment litigation has boomed over the last decade or so, and those cases can unfold over years—especially if they go all the way to the Supreme Court.

But, as the Chinese proverb says, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Lawsuits against employers are often initiated by an alleged victim contacting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by phone.

That fundamental communication process is in a major transition as the EEOC continues to bring in-house all of the work that had been done during the last few years at a call center. This major undertaking—the agency received about 90,000 calls in the last month—has created controversy on the EEOC board. Here’s an article from Workforce.com regarding the situation that posted on December 17: “EEOC Hires Temporary Workers to Staff Phones During Transition.”

 On Tuesday, February 19, the EEOC approved the hiring of 61 permanent staff to help field calls. In mid-March, they will replace the 37 temporary employees who have been filling in since mid-December after the call center was shut down. The commission also extended for nearly 11 months the use of a voice recognition system that helps manage calls.

In addition, the EEOC set in motion what it calls a long-term solution, allowing its field office to select a telecommunications vendor for a five-year contract for an enhanced customer response system.

Citing federal procurement laws, the commission wouldn’t reveal the size of the contracts. But based on a slip by a commissioner at a December meeting, it’s probably safe to guess that the extension of the voice recognition system will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 million.

Although the commission vote was unanimous, tension remains high among the commissioners over the call center transition. The short-term extension of the voice recognition contract and the bidding for a long-term vendor were rolled together into one vote to speed up the process. But the commission agreed to a complicated formula that would bring the vendor decision back to the commission if it exceeded cost estimates.

This may sound like internal politics at a federal bureaucracy, but there are important implications for discrimination victims and the companies that defend against their suits.

For one thing, the EEOC is a busy place. Its inventory of cases has increased from 39,000 in 2006 to 54,000 last year. And the phone keeps ringing off the hook. During the last month, 80 percent of 90,000 queries required the response of a live operator. “We don’t have enough people in our offices right now to answer calls,” Cynthia Pierre, director of EEOC field management programs, said after the commission meeting.

The 61 new hires will help, as will the strengthened capabilities of the voice recognition system. For instance, callers will now automatically be routed to the nearest of 15 EEOC regional offices. In the future, the system also will be able to direct them to the EEOC staffer who has expertise in the area of their concern

That kind of knowledge will be crucial because EEOC demand may spike further if employment discrimination bills supported by congressional Democratic majorities become law.

“There are a number of pieces of legislation pending, some complex,” said EEOC Chair Naomi Earp. “We could get a tremendous volume of calls, and they should be directed.”

So far, the EEOC has not received many complaints from people who have gotten misdirected—or lost—in the phone system. But even a few fumbles might create a problem.

“Anytime someone gets a busy signal, it’s a lost opportunity,” said Leslie Silverman, EEOC vice chair.

The intake process would be further undermined if an overworked EEOC staffer mishandles a complaint. The Supreme Court is considering a case in which FedEx argues that a discrimination suit should be dismissed because an EEOC charge wasn’t properly filed.

The shutdown of the outsourced EEOC call center won’t have a dramatic impact on the number of charges filed, according to Gerald Maatman Jr., a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago. But any internal EEOC mistake could allow a company to say that it didn’t get a fair chance to respond.

“You have created an additional defense for the employer,” Maatman said.

Don’t dismiss these bureaucratic details as just another Washington evil. At the EEOC, they could influence employment lawsuits—starting with a simple phone call.

I have a fairly broad beat in Washington. I cover legislation, regulations and court rulings that affect employers. I also try to keep an eye on regional companies. Most activities in this town could be a legitimate news item for me, if I pursue my charge in the most literal terms.

So, I have to triage the news of the day in Washington. This week, the capital has been dominated by a fight between the White House and Congress on one bill that would restrict the interrogation techniques the CIA can use on terrorists and another that would authorize surveillance that could involve tapping phone conversations.

Whew! I can leave that mess to the national papers and the wire services, I thought to myself. I’ll concentrate on the Bush administration’s proposal for regulatory changes to the Family and Medical Leave Act.

But, in the words of Lee Corso, my favorite ESPN college football analyst: Not so fast, my friend. An editor sent to me earlier this week a story about a supervisor at a Provo, Utah, self-help firm who is being sued for allegedly waterboarding one of his salespeople in an attempt to motivate him and his colleagues to do a better job.

Waterboarding is a method of interrogating a prisoner in which the questioner pours water over a prisoner’s head to simulate drowning. The manager did just that to his employee, saying that he wanted his team “to work as hard on making sales as Chad had worked to breathe while he was being waterboarded,” according to a claim filed by the victim.

So, it turns out that waterboarding does impact my beat. It says to me that it’s not only legislation and regulations coming out of Washington that affect managers. So does the general debate and posture that the administration and Congress take on various issues.

The White House maintains that the CIA should not be restricted to processes authorized in the Army Field Manual when it tries to pry information out of terrorist suspects. CIA agents have hundreds of hours of training and can go beyond what the Army guide mandates for members of the military service, according to the administration.

The bill Congress passed would restrict interrogation techniques to those listed in the manual, which would eliminate waterboarding. President Bush has vowed to veto that measure.

“The United States needs the ability to interrogate effectively, within the law, captured al Qaeda terrorists,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said at a briefing on Thursday. “Limiting the CIA to the Army Field Manual effectively repeals the terrorist interrogation program that (Congress) authorized just two years ago.”

She went on to say that waterboarding currently is not an option. “All the interrogations that have taken place in this country have been done in a legal way,” she said.

But she got to that answer after having been prodded and poked on the subject by the White House press corps. In fact, President Bush temporizes on the issue.

The nuances of the debate are probably lost on supervisors in offices around the country. They see a president who is arguing that the United States needs to be tough on terrorists in order to protect Americans. Each time they observe the muscular posture of the president, they may believe that waterboarding is OK. President Bush doesn’t dismiss it out of hand, after all.

If that’s not enough, they see Jack Bauer torturing characters on “24” every week—at least when the Hollywood writers aren’t on strike. They also see the ultimate antihero, Tony Soprano, “whacking” folks who get in his way on HBO.

Tony, Jack and President Bush are the good guys in many people’s opinions. And I’m certainly not for any kind of censorship of Hollywood or unreasonable restrictions on the president in executing national security policy.

But supervisors need to stay grounded in reality. It’s not OK for them to torture just because Hollywood does it. And the CIA knows a whole lot more about it than anyone in an office setting does. They’re the professionals, after all.

But the president also needs to keep in mind that whenever he doesn’t stomp on the notion that America tortures prisoners, he may be fostering such behavior in his own constituents.

Of course, all of this may work itself out. Each of the three leading candidates to replace Bush—Sens. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton—opposes waterboarding.

When President Bush soon signs economic stimulus legislation totaling about $160 billion, he wants to be done with it.

It contains the elements that were Bush’s priority—tax rebates for individuals and tax incentives for business investment. He was able to get Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to limit additions.

They settled on inserting higher Social Security payments. In response to opposition by the White House and many Senate Republicans, they left out an extension of unemployment benefits.

That represented a victory for AARP and a loss for organized labor. But labor will try to stage a comeback in the sequel to the stimulus bill, which many Democrats insist should include a boost in unemployment payments.

It looks as if they will continue to face resistance from the White House. Edward Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, maintains that unemployment hasn’t reached a level that requires action.

“Extension of unemployment benefits has never occurred when the unemployment rate was below 5.7 percent,” he said at a briefing for White House reporters on Monday, February 11. “And usually, if you look at the historical record, it’s somewhat closer to 7 percent. So it would be unprecedented to extend unemployment benefits at a time when the unemployment rate is 4.9 percent.”

If Senate Republicans were brave enough on the first pass-through to oppose changing unemployment policy during an election year with a potential recession looming, it’s a good bet that they’ll keep hanging together.

But Democratic leaders like Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, intend to put up a fight. He called the stimulus bill a down payment, not the final check, when it comes to government efforts to juice the economy.

“It’s clear the White House doesn’t begin to understand the anxiety that tens of millions of American families are suffering, and the stimulus bill … leaves too many of them out,” he said in a statement this week. “The best response by Congress … is to pass immediate additional targeted relief to those in need, with specific help for the unemployed and for families who can’t afford to heat their homes.”

Given the Democratic majorities’ strong inclination to advance employment legislation that expands worker rights and to promote bills that bolster the labor movement, it’s been fascinating to see them get stymied time and again.

We’ll have to see during the remaining months of the 110th Congress whether the trend continues. In the meantime, Democrats are hoping they can increase their numbers in the Senate and put a colleague in the White House. That is probably the surest way to achieve the outcome they seek on employment law.

Meanwhile, Bush and the Senate Republicans continue to be extraordinarily effective in winning the daily policy grind in the capital. Will they now be able to come up with an election narrative about workforce issues that voters embrace?

Most of the time, corporations and unions have an antagonistic relationship. Organizing efforts are often cast as a zero-sum game. The more power the unions gain, the more business costs will rise and profits will decline. The unions say that if their membership grows, more people will enter the middle class.

In the midst of this fear and loathing, the presidential campaign offers a chance for candidates to turn their amorphous calls for change into actual, bold proposals. As I write this entry, I’m not sure how Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, has fared on Super Tuesday. But he likely will remain viable for a while, regardless of how many states he won or lost.

Here’s something Obama, as the primary purveyor of change, could propose in the area of people management. He’s garnered the backing of many unions and tens of thousands of union members. Perhaps he should propose a way for them to change the atmosphere in labor relations by reaching out to management in an area that directly affects their future–training.

This is a topic on which labor has built a solid reputation. Unions take pride in ensuring that their members are up to industry standards in many different trades. Companies are desperate to find qualified employees, or failing that, to bolster the skills of the people who do fill their open positions.

An example of how a company and union have worked together can be found at Boeing. The manufacturer churns out one 737 aircraft every day. In putting together the mammoth products, technicians work on 92,288 pieces of equipment at Boeing operations in Oregon and Washington alone. Many of these are precision machine tools that cost from $300,000 to more than $1 million.

Boeing realized a couple years ago that its workers didn’t have the appropriate skill levels to handle these complex machines that produce planes that must be perfectly constructed to ensure safety. So, in 2004, Boeing established Craft College.

Over the past three years, about 4700 students have attended 803 classes, according to Jim Fleming, project manager and an instructor at Craft. Fleming, who spoke at the Training 2008 Conference & Expo in Atlanta on February 4.

Management and employees worked together to identify required skills and develop a curriculum. “That’s what made this a success,” says Larry Tibbels, a project manager in Boeing’s quality through training program. “We have union buy-in and acceptance of the courses.”

The training benefits the company, of course, because it brings up to speed workers who had minimal skills when they were hired. “If you’re going to survive in this world, you’re going to have to develop your own training,” says Mike DePew, a senior manager of equipment services at Boeing.

If a lack of human capability causes a machine breakdown, it’s costly for Boeing. “We can’t have line stoppers,” Fleming says.

The skill upgrades boost the careers of Boeing employees, too. Training increases job satisfaction because they are acquiring the background that not only will help them at Boeing but also make them competitive in the job market.

“From the day you start working to the day you retire, you’re building your resume for your next opportunity,” DePew says.

If labor and management work together at more companies, those opportunities will grow.