(FORTUNE Magazine) – OVERTIME FOLLIES

Life is unfair--right? So why should labor standards be fair? This knockout question smote one between the eyes recently after a surfeit of news stories wherein Labor Secretary Robert Reich was cagily positioning himself as opposed to "worker abuse" and "virtual slavery" and representing that sweatshops would be even rifer than they now are but for the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which is of course administered by his noble department.

The FLSA sets a whole lot of workplace standards, all increasingly opposed by economists. The standards provide for minimum wages, time and a half for overtime, and numerous restrictions on young persons in the work force. In arguing for this landmark legislation, Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1937 that "all but the hopeless reactionary will agree" on its necessity. Your retrograde servant recently stumbled across that quote in an anti-FLSA article by James Bovard of the Cato Institute, writing in Regulation, and suddenly remembered the last time he took an IQ test. This was in 1989, and we were confronting the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale because that seemed like a good idea for somebody writing a book on IQ. In a section of the test called Comprehension, designed to gauge one's commonsense understanding of the world he lives in, there was a question asking why child-labor laws are necessary. Risking the loss of precious IQ points, we retorted that in our judgment, supported by many economists, they were in fact not necessary and probably did more harm than good. Luckily, our tester agreed to settle for the theory behind the law, which is that young persons ought to be in school. Why a 13-year-old should be allowed to mow the neighbor's grass but barred from summer mailroom jobs in air-conditioned offices is an issue the theory does not address.

But we wander. The problem with all the FLSA restrictions is that they are growth destroyers: They limit the mutually advantageous deals that workers and employers can agree on, and they keep marginal workers out of the labor force--which is why organized labor loves the restrictions. As Bovard observes, the minimum wage today is effectively a sentence of unemployment for anybody whose work is not worth $4.25 an hour.

The child-labor laws were always popular because of those lithographs featuring 8-year-olds toiling glumly in windowless factories 150 years ago; unfortunately, we have no counterpart illustrations of kids starving because they failed to latch on to such jobs. Similarly, one has to believe that the illegal immigrants endlessly funneled into New York and California sweatshops--and playing major roles in Reich's press conferences--are far better off with the jobs than without them, and certainly better off than they would be back home. Not that deportation seems to be much of an issue in the sweatshops exposed by our government. Over and over again, the remedial action reported is against the employers--who are penalized for their failure to pay the minimum wage and/or required overtime (and for hiring illegal aliens). The illegals themselves seem to hang around and, when they are lucky, find other sweatshops.

The current action in Congress is centered on correcting various absurdities associated with overtime. In the fairy-tale version, time and a half after 40 hours is fair recompense for the overworked. In the real-word version, overtime work is often aggressively sought by workers like the truck drivers delivering the New York Daily News. Before Mort Zuckerman bought the paper, some of them were earning $100,000 a year.

So far, at least, the overtime legislation surfacing in Congress seems merely sensible. The so-called Work and Family Integration Act, introduced by Senator John Ashcroft of Missouri, would allow more flexible deals in which workers and employers could agree to average 40 hours a week over four weeks without triggering overtime--even if some individual week in the period was well above 40 hours. The bill would also allow workers to be compensated with extra time off, instead of extra pay, for hours worked beyond the new limits. Ashcroft's presentations focus on the gains in togetherness made possible by, say, workers' newfound ability to take time off for a kid's Little League game. All fair enough, but why do we need any overtime pay rules at all? Why not just abolish time and a half, period, along with the minimum-wage and child-labor laws? That is what one lonely reactionary keeps asking.

RADICAL CHIC FOREVER

One does not claim that the problem to be adumbrated in the next sentence ranks in anybody's top ten, only that it keeps the present scrivener reaching for the Maalox. Genesis of the dyspepsia: the relentless sappiness of the mighty American press when it passes judgment on people of the left. Like, most recently, Bill Kunstler.

Really, fellows. Kunstler was an outrageous egomaniac, a lawyer who seemingly selected his clients (ranging from Martin Luther King to Islamic terrorists to John Gotti) for their headline potential. But as a man of the left, he had the obit writers drooling last month. He "never failed to raise people's consciousness" (Madison, Wisconsin's Capital Times); he "was blessed with the happiness and the nonchalant courage that come of living according to one's principles" (the New Yorker); "a hero" (the Atlanta Journal and Constitution); "he will be missed for a very long time" (the Philadelphia Inquirer).

Actually, one felt that the recent Robeson coverage was even worse. Paul Robeson, who died in 1976, was in the news recently because he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame. This led the New York Times to identify him matter-of-factly as "the greatest football player of his time" (move over, Red Grange) and led lots of other publications to agree with the Times' formulation about Robeson being controversial "because of his liberal beliefs and efforts to win equal rights for blacks." To be slightly reasonable about all this, Robeson was unpopular because he spent much of his adult life promoting Soviet communism, as evidenced by his statement at the height of Cold War tensions that American Negroes would never fight the Soviet Union, by his acceptance of the Stalin Peace Prize, and by his appearance at a Communist rally covered by a juvenile version of yours truly, where he had them sobbing in Madison Square Garden with his famous rendition of the Soviet National Anthem (a collector's item in the 78-rpm days).

Equally tough on the duodenum was the treatment accorded crusading journalist George Seldes, who died this summer at 104. Cheerleading terms like "independent" and "muckraker" were all over the obits, whose main theme was that the man had taken on the establishment press, "uncovering stories that had been overlooked by others, exposing corruption and challenging the practices of leading newspapers" (to again quote the New York Times). National Public Radio weighed in with a feature about Seldes's unique "credibility." But anybody who actually researches Seldes's record during his glory years--roughly the mid-Thirties to the late Forties--will discover that he was a party-line hack who kept telling you the defendants in the Moscow Trials were guilty and said Wendell Willkie was a fascist. And now he's chic. And the Maalox is flying.

COUNTING RACE

"You'll have fun with this," said the note attached to the August 28 Federal Resister, and while "fun" does not exactly capture the reading experience, the document was memorable if not mind-blowing. It depicts two sizable organizations--the federal Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Census Bureau--agonizing over a weirdly impossible task. What they are supposed to do in time for the year 2000 census is create new racial/ethnic categories that will (a) reflect the country's increasing diversity and (b) acknowledge the claims of numerous groups feeling ignored or misclassified in the existing categories but also (c) keep the number of categories at a manageable level while above all (d) not offending the pressure groups whose benefits and preferences are tied to the existing categories. The Federal Register indicates that the bureaucracy is still writhing away at the problem, still palavering with "affected groups." But soon some hapless wretches in censusland must make up their minds.

It is clear enough that the existing categories defy common sense and bewilder millions. They divide all Americans into four races: (1) white, (2) black, (3) Asian/Pacific Islander, and (4) American Indian/Alaskan Native. Also into two ethnic groups: (1) Hispanic, (2) non-Hispanic. Are Pakistanis white or Asian? Middle Easterners are defined as white, but OMB sadly notes that there is much confusion about the boundaries of the Middle East. Indian immigrants from Mexico who would have been classified as Native Americans if born north of the Rio Grande are now classified as Hispanics. Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii is leading a movement to get native Hawaiians classified as Native Americans instead of as Pacific Islanders. Any such switch would obviously propel some Hawaiians into the casino business, which is possibly one reason the National Congress of American Indians is opposed to this deal.

The intractable problem confronting any classification system is that more and more Americans have mixed origins. Here is a story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune about a 6-year-old child of white, black, and Indian heritage whose parents rebelled when told that they had to pick one race for the local school's records. The parents want a "multiracial" box for the census, not to mention the school's forms. An Atlanta-based organization called RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) is promoting this new box and seems to have a lot of support.

But predictably, a "multiracial" category is opposed by traditional civil rights groups (e.g., the National Urban League), which worry that it will dilute black political muscle. A common estimate is that genes from white ancestors represent 20% or more of an average black's heritage--meaning that many if not most blacks could properly check a multiracial box. Any such turn would obviously make it harder to monitor civil rights laws based on proportional-representation concepts and would instantly call into question the boundaries of congressional districts drawn to create minority solons.

Our own guess about the census bureaucrats is that they will ultimately decide the political balance of power calls for only minimal changes. But there is an interesting long-shot possibility: a decision to ask for much less information about race--maybe even none. To be sure, this could happen only in the context of political earthquakes further undermining affirmative action and promoting color-blindness. To also be sure, that is what the Doleans and Gingrichites say they want.