New Look at Labor

President Reagan’s nomination of William E. Brock III to be secretary of labor is a rare case of inspired federal personnel policy. Brock is a natural politician whose career has involved debating and negotiating broader issues than wages and working conditions. He is bright and outgoing. Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO, calls him an “old friend.”

Without the burden of suspicions about his past that made his predecessor, Raymond J. Donovan, at best a part-time Cabinet officer, Brock can devote his full attention to some crucial issues for the nation’s economy. Because he is a moderate Republican, but not so much so that he is a misfit among Reaganites, he will disagree with labor as often as he performs the traditional task of the job--representing the interests of labor at the Cabinet level. He is not likely to back away from such issues as an Administration campaign to cut the minimum wage on the unproven grounds that such cuts would open more jobs to minority youths. But, as one union official put it, the arguments at least will be conducted with civility.

Brock’s most important task in his new job may turn out to be similar to that of his old job as the U.S. trade representative--fighting trade protectionism. The difference is that he will be talking not with foreign countries but with Congress and with leaders of smokestack labor unions who have watched employment shrink dramatically and have turned to demands for quotas and high tariffs to protect their industries and, in turn, the jobs of their members.

The President must make one more inspired personnel decision. Brock was good at his old job. With economies around the world still in flux, with products like steel still in surplus, with agriculture increasingly a target of attempts to erect trade barriers, Reagan needs now to find someone as good to carry on the fight against protectionism.