Civil rights groups criticize Bush's nominee for Labor

While the new secretary of labor faces challenges of updating laws that seem outdated in the “new economy,” President-elect George W. Bush’s nominee for the post faces criticism over her views in the past.

Bush gets high marks for nominating a diverse group of people to his Cabinet, but the choice of Linda Chavez for labor secretary prompted criticism Wednesday from civil rights and labor groups.

Chavez’s selection to be the nation’s top enforcer of workers’ rights sends an “in-your-face” message, critics say.

But those who know Chavez say the 53-year-old veteran of Washington politics has spent her career trying to achieve economic parity for immigrants and other workers.

Still, “it’s a dramatic turn away from the agenda of the Labor Department of the last eight years,” said Les Hough of the Center for the Workplace at Georgia State University.

Chavez has held a number of government posts, including staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission during the Reagan administration. She has built a career advocating bootstrap assimilation and is a vocal opponent of a federal minimum wage. She has formed or been involved in think tanks that have opposed affirmative action and bilingual education, critics note.

“This is someone whose first visible role was a direct challenge to every major civil rights institution. It certainly makes people wonder exactly what Bush meant by ‘compassionate conservatism,’ ” said Cecilia Munoz, vice president for policy at the Washington-based National Council of LaRaza, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights group.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called the Chavez nomination “an insult to American working men and women.”

But Abigail Thernstrom, a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute in New York who has known Chavez since the mid-1970s, said: “Her commitment to racial and ethnic equality runs very deep in her. I don’t have any doubts that she meant what she said when she said she will vigorously defend anti-discrimination laws. She will not allow proven instances of discrimination to go unanswered.”

Chavez came under fire when she backed a controversial piece of legislation in California, Proposition 227, that called for ending mandatory bilingual education and replacing it with English immersion classes.

“Test scores have gone up dramatically since the passage,” said Larry Mone, Manhattan Institute president. “A lot of the organized Hispanic groups that were hostile to Linda were also hostile to that initiative. Linda has the same objectives as a lot of these Hispanic groups, which is to advance Hispanics in this society. They just have significantly different views about how to achieve that.”

If approved, Chavez will assume the helm of a federal agency that is in the midst of some of its biggest changes in recent memory. In the last year alone, the agency has been locked in battles over workplace safety issues. It has gone to the mat on ergonomics rules and drew fire from corporate America over whether employers should be held liable for the safety of at-home workers.

The Georgia chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business group, will be eager to see how Chavez handles a number of key issues, such as ergonomics rules and the use of unemployment taxes to pay for family leaves.

“She and President-elect Bush are going to have to decide if they’re going to leave them alone or change them,” NFIB director Bert Fridlin said.

Politics aside, Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, a Democrat, said he’ll look for common concerns on which he and the next Labor secretary can work.

“We do agree on developing a highly skilled, well-trained work force for this nation. We agree that the “new economy” will require us to dramatically change worker training and skill development. That’s what we’re going to focus on.”



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