Cokie and Steve Roberts: Making Votes Count

W A S H I N G T O N, Jan. 4 -- As Linda Chavez stood surrounded by the beneficiaries of her good deeds, no one could question that she is a charitable person. Not only did she take in Marta Mercado, an illegal Guatemalan immigrant in dire straits, Chavez says she would do it again, even though questions about those living arrangements cost her a seat in the President’s Cabinet. Chavez said she brought the families forward as she withdrew her name from consideration as Secretary of Labor because she wanted “to try to put a human face on this story.”

But every story has a human face, even if it’s a face unseen by the people making public policy. That’s the whole point of a social safety net—to take care of those who can’t count on the kindness of strangers. And labor laws exist to try to keep working people from falling into situations where they need the safety net to catch them.

That’s what George Bush should keep in mind as he makes his next choice for Secretary of Labor, not on what Linda Chavez told the transition team. After Chavez withdrew, the president-elect said, “Her upbringing and her life’s work prepared her well for the issues facing the Labor Department.” But her sympathies didn’t.

Although a working mother herself and the child of two working parents, Chavez seemed insensitive to the time crunch of workers raising kids when she wrote that “discriminating against employees who won’t work overtime ... isn’t irrational, it may be good business.”

Or take the minimum wage. Chavez once called a proposed 90-cent increase bad policy that bordered on Marxism. But minimum wage laws are crucial for people like Marta Mercado trying to gain an economic foothold in American society. Wouldn’t Mercado be better off getting a job that paid decently than relying on handouts from Chavez, however generous?

What about the disappointed human face of the woman who’s worked hard her whole life only to be passed over for promotion because she’s hit the “glass ceiling?” Chavez dismissed the idea that women in many workplaces can’t rise above a certain level of pay and power. But the last woman to serve as Secretary of Labor in a Republican administration, former Illinois Congresswoman Lynn Martin, did a major report on the issue and concluded that the glass ceiling was in fact lower and wider than she had suspected.