Once President Barack Obama moves into the White House on January 20, we will finally get a clue as to the direction he’s taking the country.

So far, like the Rorschach test to which he has compared himself, Obama is all things to all people. He even embodies multilateralism.

He is the son of a Kenyan father, and his childhood included several years growing up in Indonesia. To a greater extent than perhaps any other U.S. president, he is the world.

But opponents of the workplace law that Obama endorsed during the campaign worry that he would move the U.S. too close to a part of the globe they say is too highly regulated and too costly a place to do business—Europe.

Most of the attention so far has been on legislation that would make it easier for workers to join unions. That bill, however, may slow down.

The so-called card-check bill is only one item on a laundry list of proposals that could gain traction quickly. The list also includes measures to mandate paid time off and to lengthen the statute of limitations on pay discrimination.

Adding to their appeal is the fact that they are budget neutral—at least as far as the federal budget is concerned. The bills require no government expenditure at a time when Washington is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up the economy.

Opponents say that the measures will cost business plenty. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky (who also is husband of outgoing Labor Secretary Elaine Chao), has cast the union bill as a step toward “Europeanizing America.”

Meanwhile, some countries in Europe are trying to become more like the U.S. by loosening their labor laws and reducing regulations. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy is pushing businesses and unions to agree to a plan to open stores on Sundays.

It’s one example of Sarkozy’s effort to address stultifying French labor laws. For instance, it’s almost impossible to dismiss a worker in France on grounds of incompetence, according to John Johnson, an attorney and director of business development at Daem Partners in Paris.

Johnson practiced law in California for more than a dozen years before moving to France about nine years ago to pursue personal projects. He was certified as a lawyer in France in 2007. In California, Johnson was a plaintiff’s attorney; in France, he represents corporations. I caught up with him while he was in the U.S. for the holidays.

Although he practiced in California, the state most friendly to employees, Johnson says that its worker protections aren’t as stringent as France’s. “You could call France ‘California-plus,’ ” he says.

Sarkozy is embarking on a long journey to reinvent the French economy. “For certain cultural and historical reasons, it’s going to be difficult to adopt a completely American or Anglo-Saxon-style system,” Johnson says. “There is a kind of distrust of all that is new.”

But there are certain advantages of the French approach for employers. For instance, companies have to pay higher taxes to support the health care system. But the coverage it provides makes it more likely that employees will get medical care and less likely to miss work because of illness, according to Johnson.

“I’m not sure you can say that national insurance coverage is a drag on economic growth,” he says.

Another advantage for companies is the French legal system. Multimillion-euro damages are unheard of, and there’s pretty much no such thing as a class-action lawsuit. Companies don’t often feel compelled to settle, as Wal-Mart did in a wage-and-hour case last week—to the tune of $640 million.

Johnson doesn’t think it’s ironic that some people see the U.S. trending toward a European-style economy while Europe looks to the other side of the Atlantic—or the English Channel—for guidance. The desperate economic times call for new thinking.

“Throughout the world, different systems are being forced to do a self-analysis,” Johnson says. “Every system is looking for a solution outside the box.”

As the global economy declines, Johnson sees the need for more experimentation and less political battle. “This old-fashioned [notion] of left-right, labor-employer doesn’t work anymore,” he says. “We’re in a different place right now. Everyone’s going to have to give something up to get something. That’s consensus.”

I can’t wait to see whether stateside Republicans and Democrats demonstrate that attitude.

President-elect Barack Obama has run circles around his predecessors when it comes to appointing his Cabinet with dispatch. All of his nominees are in place before Christmas.

One of his last announcements was that Rep. Hilda Solis, D-California, would be the secretary of labor. Solis hit political observers like a bolt out of the blue. Her name may have been on some speculation lists, but it wasn’t anywhere near the top.

Now we’ll have to see whether she will wield any true power in her role at the labor agency. The labor incumbent, Elaine Chao, served for all eight years of the George W. Bush administration but didn’t have much discernable influence, as Workforce Management editor John Hollon pointed out last week in his blog.

Solis is better known for her work on environmental issues than on workplace policy. Although unions showered her with encomiums for her support of organizing drives in Los Angeles and for co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act, her most substantive efforts on employment law came during her tenure in the California Senate. There, she spearheaded a bill to raise the minimum wage.

The fact that Obama plucked Solis out of relative obscurity may be a sign that labor groups couldn’t agree on a candidate. Solis was the compromise.

“Sometimes [presidential appointees] in Washington are picked because they’ve offended the least people,” says Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Solis may become a dynamic and influential labor secretary. But she is not starting out as a titan of the Cabinet, which doesn’t bode well. Neither does the fact that labor was one of the last two Cabinet slots filled.

For eight years, the agency has been in the wilderness of the Bush administration. Some good ideas emanated from the department, like a regional workforce planning and training program that helps communities develop their labor market based on emerging industries.

That program got its momentum because it was led by an official who was a White House favorite, according to a department source. For the most part, President Bush consolidated control of the administration in the West Wing.

Obama may institute the same practice. One clue is that he’s naming “czars” to oversee several policy areas, including energy, the economy and health care. There also will be a “car czar” to sort out the mess in the auto industry. The term “czar” has been used more during the Obama transition than at a film school seminar on “Doctor Zhivago.”

The power that these czars wield often comes at the expense of Cabinet secretaries—except when the czar is a Cabinet official like Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Tom Daschle.

The important thing about a czar is that his or her appointment highlights an area that an administration cares about deeply. That’s why it’s interesting that Obama has not appointed a “workforce czar” to sort out disparate, costly and often ineffective federal training programs. Neither he nor Republican nominee John McCain addressed this area with much vigor during the campaign, as I pointed out in an October 17 post.

Most Workforce Management readers would say that one of the top challenges they face each day is a lack of talent for key jobs. At the press conference announcing Solis’ appointment, Obama and Solis mentioned training as a priority. 

But a large part of the responsibility for addressing that area will fall to the White House Task Force on Working Families, which will be chaired by Vice President-elect Joe Biden. One of the panel’s charges is “expanding education and lifelong training opportunities.” But it also will delve into “improving work-family balance; restoring labor standards, including workplace safety; helping to protect middle-class and working-family incomes; and protecting retirement security.”

That’s a big agenda led by Biden. The task force could supplant the labor secretary as the leader on key workplace issues—diluting the impact that a strong Cabinet member can make.

Washington teems with former class presidents. Sometimes too many leaders can run an issue into the quicksand of inertia.

One of my regrets from my undergraduate days was that I didn’t major in economics. I was in the School of Management at Purdue University when a professor encouraged me to change my degree track.

I turned him down. Years later, I wish I hadn’t ignored Professor Hueckel’s advice. An economics education provides a compelling framework for discerning how the world works. But I did take a couple econ courses.

One of the terms I still remember is “stickiness of wages.” This is the concept that once someone has been given a raise, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get him or her to give it up.

During the congressional debate over the auto bailout last week, Senate Republicans essentially asked autoworkers to immediately cut their wages. Part of the deal proposed by Sen. Robert Corker, R-Tennessee, would have required the United Auto Workers to lower its members’ pay by a certain date to achieve parity with the compensation offered by U.S. operations of Toyota, Honda and Nissan.

Senate Republicans claimed that car companies spend $71 per hour on labor versus the $49 per hour that foreign manufacturers pay. They demanded union concessions as one of the prices for their support of an auto industry bailout.

“We simply cannot ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, in floor speech during the debate.

The UAW disputes that the wage disparity is that great. The union also maintains it already made sacrifices to pave the way for a bailout. It agreed to let the car companies delay billions of dollars of payments into the fund that would cover retiree health benefits. It also shut down the “jobs bank” that allowed workers to continue collecting their pay even when they were laid off.

The unions say they went the extra mile by negotiating with Corker. But they refused to agree to the arbitrary deadline for wage parity. The union said in a statement that it “recognized that this would take time to work out and implement, using attrition programs to allow the companies to hire new workers at the lower wage and benefit rates.”

Reasonable people can disagree about whether generous union contracts have led to the near downfall of U.S. carmakers. But the wages earned by auto workers are a fact of life.

What American worker, in any industry, would have the wherewithal to immediately give up a big chunk of his or her pay? Could you do that? I couldn’t.

In the days since the demise of the bailout bill, the UAW has made its displeasure with Corker known. The only thing keeping a lid on the passion is that the Bush administration is going to use some of the previously approved federal rescue money to help the car companies.

But the bad blood between the GOP and unions will continue to boil. Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, expressed his frustration even before Senate Republicans filibustered the bill.

In a conference call last week on an economic stimulus bill sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, Gerard said that the recession is gutting America’s industrial base.

“There’s a whole bunch of angry and anxious [union] members out there,” Gerard said.

He warned the GOP not to scuttle the auto bailout.

“If we have Republicans that try to hold this up, we’re going to take to the streets,” Gerard said.

Republicans make some cogent and persuasive arguments that unionization raises costs for employers. But you have to wonder whether the party chose the right fight by going after organized labor on the auto bailout.

The unions may have earned sympathy during the tussle. And now they will be even more fired up to push through Congress the Employee Free Choice Act. The so-called card-check bill would make it easier for workers to organize.

Republicans and business groups have vowed to kill the bill. Their assertion that it undermines the secret ballot in the workplace might gain traction. But the GOP may find that poking labor in the eye over the auto bailout enraged its competitor—making a win on card-check a sticky proposition.
 

You’ve got the world by the tail on a downhill drag.

My parents would say that to me when I was whining about insurmountable obstacles in life or taking considerable blessings for granted.

That aphorism comes to mind this week as a bill that would make it easier for workers to unionize loses momentum. The slowdown is due in part to Democrats and their organized-labor allies, who had the political world by the tail on a downhill drag after the election but now face an incline when it comes to getting the so-called card-check bill passed.

The primary provision in the legislation would allow employees to form a union when a majority of them sign cards authorizing one. It would effectively eliminate the ability of companies to demand a secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

It is the top priority of organized labor, which has seen its numbers dwindle to 7 percent of the private sector and 12 percent of the total workforce. Unions have rightly claimed credit for President-elect Barack Obama’s decisive Electoral College victory, especially in the industrial Midwest.

Following the election, unions had a gleam in their eye about card check. They were predicting quick action on Capitol Hill, which is dominated by Democrats, and enthusiastic support from Obama.

Unions may still get what they want on the bill, but the process has become more difficult. First, it may fall to a lower rung on Obama’s agenda as he first addresses the recession.

A more recent problem involves allegations that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to sell to the highest bidder the Senate seat that Obama is vacating.

As my colleague Jeremy Smerd reported, a buyer Blagojevich allegedly hoped to entice was the Service Employees International Union, a vociferous advocate for card check. Blagojevich hoped to get himself appointed to a lucrative position with Change to Win, the coalition of seven unions led by the SEIU, in exchange for putting a strong card-check backer in Obama’s seat and presumably getting Obama to move card check up the White House’s legislative agenda.

This overreach by Blagojevich—and implicitly by SEIU—may set back the effort to get the bill passed. First, the whiff of scandal could foul the atmosphere surrounding card check.

Look for the bill’s opponents to take advantage of the scandal. A spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Workforce Freedom Initiative says it’s too soon to tell how things will shake out. But the tremors could be sizable.

“It’s a potential sea change,” Justin Hakes says.

And it’s not just a matter of atmospherics. There is the practical matter of replacing Obama. The Democrats currently have a 58-41 lead over Republicans in the Senate, with one race undecided.

Under the chamber’s rules, 60 votes are needed to stop a filibuster, which killed card check in 2007, when Democrats had a 51-49 advantage and fell short by a handful of votes.

Now there are two seats still in play—in Illinois and Minnesota. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota, is maintaining a slim lead in the recount of his race. If he wins, the Democratic advantage slips to 58-42.

Following the Blagojevich scandal, Democrats are calling for a special election to replace Obama. That would likely keep his seat open for a while, dropping the Democratic total to 57. For Republicans, an open seat is as good as a Republican pickup when it comes to preventing passage of the card-check bill in the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

It is improbable that a Republican would win a special election in Obama’s home state. But that’s a better chance than impossible, which was the case when the Democratic governor was poised to make the appointment.

Consider this: What if the Republicans choose a candidate who has high statewide name identification and who wouldn’t have to introduce himself to Illinois voters over the course of a few short weeks? What if that candidate was able to convince voters, as Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss did a week ago in his runoff, that Senate Republicans are the only check on Democratic power in Washington? What if the Illinois candidate ran against a Democrat who is tainted by Blagojevich having tried to broker a deal for him or her?

I don’t know much about Illinois politics. But if state Republicans could convince former House Speaker Dennis Hastert or former Gov. Jim Edgar to run, they might make the special election competitive.

Organized labor still has a significant lead in pushing the card-check bill. But now that momentum may be slowing over Obama’s seat.

“It could delay or prevent a vote on the bill, depending on how long the delay is and what other political priorities are addressed first,” Hakes says.

I took you on a bit of a detour through politics in this post. It was important, though, in illustrating that Democrats may face an uphill card-check battle.

So far, President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet and White House appointments have had a “dog in the nighttime” effect on Republicans. The selections, like the intruder in the Sherlock Holmes mystery, haven’t made them bark.

The reason the dog remained quiet, Holmes deduced, is because he knew the late-night visitor who stole the race horse Silver Blaze before a major race. The dog’s sanguine reaction helped the fictional detective narrow the list of suspects.

Similar to the stable dog, Republicans have kept quiet—or even voiced support—of Obama’s choices for economic and national security leadership positions.

The people Obama tapped to head the Treasury, the National Economic Council and his Economic Recovery Advisory Board—Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers and Paul Volcker, respectively—are generally centrist and soothing to Republicans.

On national security, Obama even allowed a Republican, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to remain in place for the next year.

Having stayed in the middle of the road on economic and national security personnel, Obama is now free to swerve to the left in selecting a secretary of labor. With this choice, he is likely to satisfy progressives—formerly known as liberals—and organized labor.

Both groups played a significant role in putting Obama in office, and they’ve been patiently waiting for a Cabinet appointment that they can celebrate. Republicans will growl.

I’m not going to guess who Obama will place at the Labor Department helm, but it almost certainly will be someone who supports the Employee Free Choice Act, the so-called card-check bill, and who vows to use the agency’s regulatory and enforcement mechanisms to crack down on employers.

In an Obama administration, the Department of Labor, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, “will be emboldened (and further funded with bigger budgets) to pursue aggressive investigations against employers for wage and hour violations, unfair labor practice charges and charges of unlawful discrimination,” writes Gerald L. Maatman Jr., a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago, in a November 24 report.

Two people whose names have been mentioned as potential Labor secretaries—former Rep. David Bonior and NLRB member Wilma Liebman—recently spoke in favor of the unionization bill at a November 20 event in Washington.

Greater unionization would be a step toward “enlightened capitalism,” Bonior said. In such an economy, workers on Main Street will get as much attention and support as financiers on Wall Street.

More Americans will rise to the middle class through the wages and benefits they receive in collective bargaining, according to Bonior.

“It’s not a coincidence that the widening income gap in the United States of America tracks the decline in union density,” Bonior said.

Liebman foresees a major overhaul of employment law during the Obama administration, with the card-check bill serving as the foundation.

“Everything starts with being able to win union representation in the workplace,” she said.

Bonior has ruled himself out of contention for labor secretary. Liebman said she won’t turn down a job she hasn’t been offered. Regardless of who takes over the department, it is likely to play a prominent role in Obama’s effort to address economic woes.

In fact, by giving Obama a decisive electoral vote victory, Americans may be signaling that they want Washington to be more involved in the economy.

“With the election occurring against the backdrop of housing, financial and automaker crises, a consumer confidence rate at the lowest level in recorded history, a plunging stock market that eviscerated 401(k) plans and other retirement savings accounts, as well as the highest unemployment rate since 2001, the electorate is increasingly distrustful of the private sector and more willing to rely on government initiatives to secure their future,” Maatman writes.