Send Them a Message

The provisions are complex enough to fill 1,000 pages. Among other things, the 1988 omnibus trade bill would give the President special authority to conduct international negotiations and strengthen his ability to retaliate against "pervasive" barriers raised by foreign countries against U.S. imports. But the debate on the bill is being dominated by a rather extraneous and distinctly secondary issue: Should manufacturers be forced to give employees 60 days' notice before closing a plant?

Ronald Reagan last week vowed that if a bill containing the plant-closing provision "is unloaded on my desk, I will stamp it REJECT and ship it back to where it was made." The House nonetheless fought off an attempt to strip the provision from the bill and then passed the legislation 312 to 107. The Senate votes this week; the only question is whether the trade bill, three years in the making and supported by groups as diverse as organized labor, farmers and the oil industry, will pass by a vote larger than the two-thirds necessary to override the expected veto.

The controversial plant-closing requirement would oblige employers of 100 or more workers to give them 60 days' notice before shutting down an operation or conducting heavy layoffs (500 workers or a third of the labor force). Arguments for and against the proposal are less than compelling. Democrats and unionists contend that notice is an act of simple humanitarianism that allows workers time for adjustment to a blow that would otherwise shatter their lives. Says Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum: "It's time to mandate a little human decency." But many companies already give notice voluntarily or shut down a plant in stages. The AFL-CIO, which depends on the Labor Department for information, has trouble proving its case through either hard numbers or vivid anecdotes.

On the other side, Gary Holmes, spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, asserts that the plant-closing provision "will make our industries less competitive internationally . . . It injects rigidities into the system ((and)) makes it less flexible." But that does not explain why Japan, which has a notice system, and West Germany, where it is difficult to fire anyone, let alone close a whole plant, are competitive enough to force the U.S. to consider a sweeping trade bill.

The real arguments have more to do with symbolism than logic. Adoption of the plant-closing provision would give organized labor one of its few legislative victories of recent years, and the AFL-CIO is going all out to win. It has threatened to withdraw its support of the whole bill if the plant- closing provision is stripped from it. Corporate and White House opponents fear not so much that the provision will do great damage in itself but that it will set a precedent for increasing Government regulation of business, which is anathema to Reagan's free-market philosophy. Some partisans on both sides confess privately that the provision is not worth the passion being expended on it. But such thoughts come too late: the battle lines have been drawn.