On Monday, October 26, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may have initiated a turning point in health care reform.

He indicated that a government-run insurance program for people under 65, a so-called public option, would be included in the measure that goes to the Senate floor next month.

Now Washington pundits are furiously doing the math, trying to figure out whether Reid, D-Nevada, has 60 votes to overcome a filibuster and send a sweeping health care bill to President Barack Obama’s desk. Of course the House will play some role as well.

This routine has been a staple of capital life since last November. That’s when Democrats took control of the White House and increased their margins in the House and the Senate, where their caucus has reached a filibuster-proof 60 members.

Every time a major piece of legislation comes along, there is the mandatory calculation to figure out whether Democrats can come up with 60 votes, either by holding their own ranks together or drawing in a couple Republicans.

But winning elections has another—and perhaps more profound—effect on governance when one party controls both the Senate and White House. Its nominees for administration positions are almost certain to be confirmed.

Personnel is policy, goes the Washington saying. The reason that aphorism has been repeated to the point of becoming a cliché is because it’s true. One of the most cherished spoils of political victory is determining who serves at government’s highest levels.

In the polite society of the Senate, the rule in the past has been that a president pretty much gets to appoint the nominees of his (one day “her”) choice unless they have a criminal background or are otherwise egregiously unfit for office.

But Obama’s rival for the White House, Sen. John McCain, has halted the confirmation process for one of the president’s nominees for the National Labor Relations Board because of policy differences.

In an October 21 hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, McCain opposed Craig Becker, who currently serves as associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union.

Echoing Becker criticisms from the business community, McCain expressed qualms about some of Becker’s articles about labor-management relations. The Yale Law School graduate doesn’t mince words when it comes to organizing in the workplace.

In an excerpt from a 1993 University of Minnesota Law Review article highlighted in a U.S. Chamber of Commerce letter to the HELP Committee, Becker writes that “employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees’ election of representatives.” With his trademark irascibility, McCain first insisted on a roll-call vote on Becker. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa and HELP Committee chairman, said that NLRB nominees are typically voted on as a bloc. Becker was being considered along with two others.

But Harkin acquiesced and allowed a separate vote on Becker. “How generous of you,” McCain sneered through a smile.

Becker was approved by a 15-8 vote, but McCain vowed to block a Senate floor vote by placing a “hold” on him. It is the prerogative of each senator to put a hold on any nominee for any reason.

McCain said that all the commotion could have been avoided if Harkin had agreed to a hearing for Becker. Harkin responded that it is Senate tradition not to conduct hearings for members of the NLRB other than the chair.

Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyoming, also voted to uphold Senate tradition. He approved Becker along with all the other nominees in the package that was presented to the HELP Committee on October 21.

It may be true that Becker deserves more scrutiny than the usual NLRB nominee. Several senators would like to know whether he still holds what some call “radical” views of labor-management relations. Others want to know what role Becker may have played in the vote-buying scandal that drove former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich out of office.

But there was a more straightforward way for McCain to put the kibosh on Becker. He wouldn’t be hassling with this nominee if he had won the White House in November. It’s one more reason why elections matter.

 August is a month of respite for Washington. Endless political fights continue but the battlefield moves back to the states and districts of members of Congress.

The traffic and decibel level ease in the capital as people take their summer vacations. The quirk in the calendar this year extended the August congressional recess into the first days of September.

But the Workforce Management beat was busy this week. Organizations on the left and right—the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, respectively—hosted Labor Day briefings. Individual experts also weighed in on the state of the U.S. employment market.

In the midst of the predictable rhetorical tussle over the Employee Free Choice Act, the bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions, there was a surprising moment of convergence between labor-leaning representatives and those who favor management.

It was on a topic that concerns both sides: How to ease worker anxiety about the wrenching changes wrought by global economic competition. They agreed that one answer is to make sure that workers receive their fair share of the productivity gains they produce for their employers.

Productivity is profit. If a company makes better products or delivers better service quicker and more cheaply than its competitors, it will win market share.

But over the last several years, the people who have reaped the vast majority of the gains are executives and shareholders. Wage disparity between the top of corporations and the middle and bottom is accelerating. The resentment of middle-class workers—and voters—has manifested itself in political pressure on Congress to rein in executive pay.

The answer from organized labor is to give workers more leverage through unionization.

“The fastest, the surest and the most effective mechanism for raising workers’ wages is the collective bargaining process,” said Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO secretary treasurer, in a speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington on August 31. “Increasing productivity only raises wages when workers have bargaining power. Take bargaining power out of the equation and you’ll still generate wealth—but it won’t get into the hands of the people who created it.”

Trumka’s answer to this dilemma—passage of EFCA—is anathema to the business community. But he also is using this argument in part to appeal to younger workers he is trying to bring into the labor movement. They are the ones who are the most technologically savvy and will deliver many of the productivity advances that corporations seek.

On September 2, I attended a book launch at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Grant Aldonas, former undersecretary of commerce for international trade, introduced Globalization and the American Worker: Negotiating a New Social Contract.

Aldonas, principal managing director of the consulting firm Split Rock International and a veteran of Republican administrations, spent part of his presentation focusing not on social contracts writ large but on labor contracts.

He made a similar argument to Trumka’s. Look at Page 18 of his PowerPoint. Aldonas calls for “aligning the interests of workers with the long-term interests of their firms” through “contracts that ensure that workers profit directly from the productivity gains they create.”

Aldonas criticized EFCA as misguided. But he did not trash unions in general.

He asserted that the only way for workers to achieve a higher standard of living is through acquiring the skills demanded in the global economy.

One of the best providers of such training in Aldonas’ view is unions. “Labor makes a much more profound investment in human capital than people realize,” he said. “We ought to honor that.”

Almost everyone agrees on the need to bolster education and training. Business and labor should step away from the battle over EFCA long enough to figure out how they can collaborate to strengthen the U.S. workforce.

Discerning trends in the Capitol Hill agenda requires skill at reading between the lines.

But President Barack Obama made the timeline for immigration reform much clearer for us all in an August 10 press conference after a summit meeting with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister.

Obama acknowledged that with health care reform slowing down, energy legislation looming in the Senate and financial regulation reform hovering in the wings, it will be impossible to pass an immigration bill this year.

“Now, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it’s very important for us to sequence these big initiatives in a way where they don’t all just crash at the same time,” Obama said. “I would anticipate that before the year is out we will have draft legislation along with sponsors potentially in the House and the Senate who are ready to move this forward, and when we come back next year, that we should be in a position to start acting.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chair of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, will be the point person on immigration reform in Congress. He originally promised to produce a comprehensive bill by Labor Day. Now he has walked that back to offering a proposal sometime this fall.

“We’re making great progress,” he told reporters just before the Senate broke for its August recess. “I’m not setting any deadlines here.”

Employment verification will continue to twist in the wind because proponents of comprehensive reform want to save that chip for negotiations involving a path to citizenship for undocumented workers currently in the United States.

So, this fall, immigration action likely will revolve around employment verification. In September, the House and Senate must reconcile different versions of homeland security appropriations bills.

The Senate measure includes permanent reauthorization of E-Verify, the government-run electronic verification system reviled by many business groups. It also codifies a Department of Homeland Security regulation that requires all federal contractors to sign up for E-Verify.

Finally, the Senate bill would deny funding to the DHS to rescind a regulation on Social Security no-match letters that could force employers to fire workers whose information on earnings reports doesn’t align with that in government databases.

There’s a lot to sort out in the homeland appropriations legislation, but not nearly as much as in health care reform. Both the House and Senate missed their goals of passing health care bills before the summer break.

That pushes the big battles into the fall. On your scorecard, note that the most important action will occur in the Senate Finance Committee. For now, it is looking like the last hope for a bipartisan bill.

Three Democrats, led by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and three Republicans, led by the ranking Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been working for weeks on a bill. Grinding out consensus means that controversial provisions—such as a public insurance option and an employer mandate—will likely fall by the wayside.

But such an outcome will enrage liberal Democrats who have staked their claim in health care reform on establishing a public option—and, to a lesser extent, an employer mandate—like the ones in House legislation and the measure produced by Senate health committee.

The business community is hoping for the bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to produce a palatable bill.

“The Finance Committee is closer to getting it right than any other plan that exists right now,” said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, a group representing chief executives of some of the largest U.S. corporations. “If they are successful, will the president support their version of reform?”

That’s probably the most important question in the health care debate. Those participating in the negotiations were optimistic but circumspect before the Senate headed home for August.

“We’re making steady progress and doing this in a very professional way,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota.

Finally, in negotiations on another bill important to Workforce Management readers, the principals aren’t providing much guidance on developments. The Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions, has been stalled for months because of a lack of support among moderate Democrats in the Senate.

Schumer also is a player on this bill. He is one of the senators trying to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy his colleagues who believe that the bill would hurt businesses struggling to survive the recession.

“There’s a group of people working on it, and we’re making great progress,” Schumer said.

Reading between the lines, it looks as if predictions that the Senate won’t act on EFCA this year may be right. But keep an eye on the measure. The exhilarating and frustrating thing about Capitol Hill is that conventional wisdom is consistently overturned.

Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota didn’t waste time endorsing a bill that would make it easier for workers to form a union.

In one of his first official acts after being sworn in Tuesday, July 7, the former Saturday Night Live writer and performer co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act. Franken joined the Senate after the Minnesota Supreme Court declared him the winner of the state’s disputed Senate race on June 30.

Franken is a sensation in Washington not for his comedic talent but because he is the 60th Democrat in the Senate. That means that on paper the Democrats have enough members to overcome Republican efforts to block legislation through a filibuster.

Such a move was the demise of EFRA in 2007. But Franken is by no means the savior of the current version of the legislation, which is a long way from achieving 60 votes.

Most of the reaction to Franken coming to the capital has centered on his role as the 60th Democrat. But what people overlook is that the 40 Senate Republicans only need to bring one Democrat to their side to sustain a filibuster.

It’s possible that it may be easier for the GOP to maintain its cohesion than for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, to keep Democrats in line. The clearest example is EFCA.

Sure, the GOP is monolithic in its opposition. But there are several Democrats that oppose a provision that would authorize a union based on a majority of employees signing cards and another that would establish mandatory arbitration for first contract negotiations.

Arlen Specter, a newly minted Democrat from Pennsylvania who switched from the Republican Party in April, is one Democrat who opposes EFCA. Another is Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Arkansas.

Specter and Pryor are both involved in negotiations on a compromise to EFCA. Observers say that an alternative bill may not emerge until late July or in September.

Proponents of the bill contend that it has stalled because of a multimillion-dollar campaign conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups. The chamber rails against EFCA as a threat to secret-ballot union elections and maintains that the measure would raise labor costs at the worst time—during a recession.

But EFCA has more problems than a determined opposition. Look at what William Gould, a Stanford law professor and chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994-98, has to say.

In a May 26 speech at the London School of Economics, Gould indicated that he backs some aspects of EFCA but opposes the two primary parts.

“But I am of the view that the other provisions (i.e., recognition on the basis of union authorization cards and the arbitration process) are either fundamentally flawed or so problematical that they need substantial change,” Gould said.

“[T]here will inevitably be more disputes about cards than there ever will be about ballots,” Gould said. “[T]he statute contains no criteria for the arbitrator to follow, creating bad policy as well as constitutional problems.”

Remember that this criticism is coming from the NLRB chair during the Clinton administration, not a fire-breathing conservative.

The fundamental problem with union elections is the way that they can be delayed by companies, according to Gould. Companies have a great advantage over unions when it comes to the campaign because no employee union organizers are barred from company property.

Charles Craver, a professor of law at George Washington University, also says that employers hold the trump cards.

“Workers really listen” when their supervisors oppose an organizing effort, Craver says. “The company has a fundamental advantage over a union because it controls the worker’s destiny.”

It’s difficult to predict how an EFCA compromise will look. But it’s a good bet that criticisms of the bill by Democrats—and their recommendations for how to improve the organizing process by limiting company influence on campaigns—will provide clues for what will emerge from negotiations.

What has passed for bipartisanship in Washington so far this year is really just the flexing of political muscle.

Throughout his campaign and his nascent administration, President Barack Obama touted his ability to forge consensus from warring political parties. So far, there’s no evidence of it. There doesn’t have to be, with Democrats holding significant majorities on Capitol Hill.

His stimulus bill passed with just three Republican votes—one of which is now on the Democratic side of the aisle. Congress approved his $3.5 trillion budget blueprint along partisan lines. And the first bill he signed—one dealing with pay discrimination—garnered only a small slice of Republican support.

Democrats often allow consideration of Republican amendments to legislation in committees and in floor debate—on the Senate side, at least. That’s because they know that have more than enough votes to squash GOP ideas.

But there was evidence during the previous Congress that normally adversarial sides could achieve consensus on major legislation. One example was a bill that put mental health and medical benefits on equal footing. The other was a measure that expanded the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In each case, the business lobby and advocacy groups came together and wrestled the legislation to the ground through tough, good-faith negotiations. The Democratic majorities in Congress left business with no other option.

Chai Feldblum led the disability side in the ADA talks. She hopes to use the model to move legislation that would foster novel work arrangements at U.S. companies.

As co-director of Workplace Flexibility 2010, an initiative based at the Georgetown University Law Center, Feldblum could be a catalyst for cooperation between business and advocacy groups.

Reaching agreement on the ADA bill required 10 months of negotiation over the definition of disability. Working through the meaning of flexible work arrangements, time off and career maintenance and re-entry—the three “buckets” of flexibility, as defined by the Georgetown group—could be a bigger challenge because there are so many dimensions to the effort.

“We think of this as more like climate change,” Feldblum says.

But she’s optimistic that consensus can be reached. “I’m more hopeful for this enterprise than [she was] for ADA,” she says.

The Society for Human Resource Management is eager to get to the negotiating table. On May 7, SHRM released a set of principles for flexible work designed to start a dialogue about alternatives to legislation like a paid sick leave bill that will soon be introduced.

The organization proposes that companies that voluntarily offer a certain amount of paid time off be protected from federal leave mandates.

Workplace Flexibility 2010 isn’t taking a position on SHRM’s idea, but it is happy that SHRM is raising its voice. “We welcome the fact of people saying: Let’s have a conversation,” Feldblum says.

The Senate is off to a bipartisan approach in addressing workplace flexibility. The Senate Workplace Flexibility Study Group was established in August by three Democrats—Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Herb Kohl  of Wisconsin, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut—and three Republicans: Michael Crapo of Idaho, Susan Collins of Maine and George Voinovich of Ohio.

The panel is looking at research and data on flexibility practices and their effect on companies and employees. And they’re listening to everyone.

“It’s as even-handed an approach as you will see in this town,” says a Lincoln aide.

The foundation of cooperation is strong. “There is no gamesmanship,” Feldblum says.

Many companies argue that flexibility is one of the keys to competitiveness. We’ll see if political competition—partisanship—can be kept out of flexibility policy.