Published on: June 7, 2017
Chief Human Resource Officers on Trends Shaping the Workplace, the Outdated Policies That Govern It – and the Way Forward
AS AMERICAN COMPANIES strive to keep up with a rapidly changing global economy, they face a serious obstacle: a workplace policy regime that is locked into a previous era. To illustrate, the legal architecture that sets the contours for federal workplace regulation is generally composed of 15 major statutes. As one would expect, each of these laws reflects the assumptions and economic conditions of when they were enacted. The most recent of these—the Family and Medical Leave Act—was signed almost a quarter of a century ago in 1993, with most others going back long before then—in some cases to the 1930s. In too many cases, these well-intended laws and regulations provide conflicting policy directives that reduce the competitiveness of American businesses and hurt American workers...