Staring straight ahead, one sees The Taft-Hartley Act--After One Year, a followup to its widely successful neighbor, The New Labor Law: What the Labor-Management Relations Act, 1947, Means to Business-men, Workers, Unions, and Their Advisors. BNA had this publication available the day Congress voted to override Truman's veto. BNA editors presented Sen. Robert Taft with a copy upon passage, and the book went on to sell 20,000 copies, an extraordinary success for that type of publication in that era.
Down the aisle, BNA's shelves reflect the social legislation of the 1960s and '70s. One is confronted by the blue spine of The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Text, Analysis, Legislative History: Operations Manual on Fair Employment Practices, Public Accommodations, Federal Assistance. This book sold more than 2,000 copies in the first three weeks. Bound in red is The Job Safety and Health Act of 1970: Text, Analysis, Legislative History: Operations Manual. And you can't miss the 1,400-plus pages of BNA's 1976 Employment Discrimination Law.
The environmental regulation of the 1970s was particularly good to BNA, which created a new division to cover the subject. U.S. Environmental Laws is an orange and black brick of a book. The adjacent shelf supports a blue-bound series with such titles as Environmental Criminal Liabilities, Environmental Law Handbook, Environmental Tax Handbook: Strategies for Compliance, and Endangered and Other Protected Species: Federal Laws and Regulations.
From here, we move into microgovernment, focusing on the 1992 book, Sexual Harassment in Employment Law. Writing in the wake of the Hill-Thomas hearings, the authors explain, "The idea that harassment could be punished through the legal system is of relatively recent origin." They note that "every woman--every woman--who has spent substantial time in the work force in the last two decades can tell at least one story about being the object of sexual harassment." This, of course, means that every employer--every employer--who has ever hired a woman is potentially liable and needs to keep apace of the ever-changing law. Continuing in the field of employment law, the shelves offer advice on Alcohol and Drugs: Issues in the Workplace and the BNA Plus Info Pack [on the] Family and Medical Leave Act.
A Core Sample
If Congress has passed an environmental, employment, or tax law, or an executive branch bureaucracy has issued a regulation in one of these areas, chances are some expert has analyzed it for BNA. Ditto for court decisions. A real-time way to get a handle on the myriad tasks you're paying your government to perform is to slice a cross-section of BNA publications for any two-week period.
Subscribers to BNA's Worker's Compensation Report learned on December 7, for instance, that after 10 years of careful study, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had issued a rule requiring employers with forklifts to develop, or hire consultants to develop, formal training programs for forklift operators, with "refresher training" every three years. Forklifts, despite being easy to operate, cause 94,000 injuries each year, according to OSHA, and 100 deaths. For a mere $16.9 million of privately incurred costs, OSHA expects this particular regulation to prevent 9,500 injuries and 11 deaths, for a total savings to industry of $135 million. In keeping with BNA's scrupulous "just the facts" approach, the report provides no clue to how this figure was calculated or whether it is believable.
Or consider this amusing tidbit on the front of the December 17 Health Care Fraud Report: "Under the proposal, to be included in the president's fiscal 1999 budget, Medicare payments for prescription drugs would be reduced to the actual amount that the drugs cost." Imagine--paying only what something "costs." According to the article, the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that in 1996 alone the government spent $446 million more than the wholesale price offered to private vendors for 22 drugs.
There are ample signs of microgovernment in the week's reports. Those who paid $816 last year for BNA's Human Resources Report were among the first to know that, as reported in the December 7 issue, "Using Subjective Factors [in promotion] Could Be Pretext for Bias." If you thought such soft skills as personality, attitude, and verbal communication were as important as fancy degrees for certain jobs, you're guilty of anachronistic thinking. The summary on the front page says it all: "Hispanic applicant can proceed with her argument that Utah state Tax Commission's interviews process, which assessed candidates for promotion on such criteria as `assertiveness' and `attitude,' contained subjective standards that could be pretexts for discrimination, court rules."
Bouncing over a column, subscribers no doubt got a chuckle out of this nugget, which ran under the boldfaced heading "Sexual Harassment": "Restaurant should have taken steps to prevent male working with history of harassing female co-workers from luring hostess into closet and attacking her, Minnesota appeals court rules."
To the untrained eye, this is all quite funny. But to business people, constant updates on the state of America's litigation explosion are serious stuff. Laws and regulations are equally important --and time-sensitive. As Ochs predicted, when people's livelihoods depend on current information, they are willing to pay handsomely to receive it. That is why the "most important" people in Washington read publications most people will never know exist. Government's growth has made it too expensive and too complicated for ordinary journalists and ordinary citizens to keep track of what it does. The news that once filled the business pages has, as Gray suggested, become the stuff of specialists.
For 70 years, BNA has stuck to its mission: "to report, interpret and explain the increasingly complicated workings of the federal government and their far-reaching impact on the economic life of the nation." And for 70 years, those complications have indeed increased. Through laws, regulations, and court decisions, our democracy has, as Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in the early 19th century, covered "the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules." Their impact includes the growth of BNA itself and of the specialists it serves.
Expanding government has been good to BNA, acknowledges Mike Cavanagh of the Business Information Division. "It works for us," he says, "because our job is to say what they're doing. And if they shut up tomorrow, we'd have many fewer subscribers."
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