A Savvy Politician, a High-Profile Job : Secretary of Labor Brings Conservatism and Pragmatism to Her National Agenda

The only woman in the Reagan Cabinet pondered the question: Where are all the other successful women?

“It beats me,” Ann Dore McLaughlin said, half-jokingly.

Why have there been so few women in the Cabinet?

The secretary of labor replied seriously, “There are a lot of women in high positions in the private sector who right now are doing so well it’s hard to attract them to government.”

Few would echo her view that the nation is crawling with female executives flush with success, but McLaughlin, 46, is an unusual woman with unusual views.

A Select Hybrid

McLaughlin is one of that select hybrid--the modern career woman and conservative politician. While her December appointment has been called a token gesture on the part of the Reagan Administration to get a woman in the Cabinet to help diffuse the gender gap in the election, McLaughlin has plunged into the job with vigor, determined to make a difference.

“The good news is that they recognized the importance of having women in the Cabinet,” McLaughlin said recently in an interview in her corner office with a stunning view of the Capitol. “Obviously I don’t think it should be limited to one.”

Joining after the departures of Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Margaret Heckler and Elizabeth Hanford Dole, McLaughlin said she does not feel any extra pressure to perform well because she is the only woman.

“I’ve been a loner in a lot of jobs, a little bit ahead as the first woman, I guess, because I’ve never taken myself seriously, I’ve taken my work seriously,” she said.

Role Model for Minorities

Continuing in a rapid, stream-of-consciousness fashion, she added, “Sure I want to succeed as a person and I work hard and I do my homework. But what I have noticed in this job and in others is the importance of doing well because of those who can identify with you, women and minorities, black men, Hispanic men and women and young people really say, ‘That’s great.’

“I worked because I had to. I had a good education, good family, good travel, but I basically started working after college, liked it, liked giving it my all. No one told me I couldn’t and I just kept going. My father trained me: you get out of life what you put in. I’ve had happy days and down days, but it’s true you get out what you put in. I had some setbacks. I mean, don’t misunderstand.”

Setbacks are not something McLaughlin talks much about: The troubles she encountered working at Union Carbide, where sources say promotions were too difficult for women to come by. Being passed up in recent years for government jobs she seemed qualified for: Reagan’s press secretary, or secretary of the Interior, where she had been the undersecretary. If McLaughlin has had setbacks, she has kept them private and moved right along.

Once described by her husband as wielding a steel fist beneath a velvet glove, McLaughlin does not shrink from a good fight. She has already squared off against Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese in advising the President not to side with Meese’s wishes to undo affirmative action law and legalize routine lie-detector tests. Sources have described McHaughlin as saying Meese would dismantle affirmative action “over my dead body,” but she shies away from confirming the quote. That was probably, she said, her “body language.”

A staunch defender of affirmative action, she is nevertheless a fiscal conservative who opposes various legislation moving through Congress that would mandate parental leave or give a federal boost to child care, two keystones of the feminist strategy to gain equality for women in the work force.

McLaughlin, who took over the Labor post in December, finds it ironic that this is the first of her many jobs that has had a large focus on women’s issues. Arriving in Washington as director of communications for the Committee to Re-elect President Nixon in the early ‘70s, McLaughlin went on to become director of the office of public affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency for two years. She returned to the private sector, working first at Union Carbide, where she was the highest-ranking woman there, then with two consulting firms. In 1981, she worked as assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of the Treasury, in 1984 she became undersecretary of the Department of Interior. In 1987 she returned to the private sector, teaching at Wharton School of Business and serving on corporate boards.

Earns High Marks

“This is the first one where, ironically, I’m speaking out on issues that are of concern to women so directly,” McLaughlin said, “women-in-the-work-force kinds of issues, whether it’s non-traditional jobs, parental leave or child care, which are really economic issues but had their roots as women’s issues.”

To this hybrid view McLaughlin brings the ideal talents of public relations and communication. She earns high marks from Administration opponents for her openness in discussing the issues and her determination to learn the field and use her skills to bring about a compromise.

“Clearly she disagrees with Pat,” said Andrea Camp, referring to her boss, Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who is pushing a family medical leave bill and a child care bill in Congress. “But what McLaughlin does is look for that common ground. What was so good is that she made the effort to keep channels of communication open. She’s met with Schroeder and she’s going to meet with the Congressional Caucus on Women’s Issues and have lunch with Dr. (T. Berry) Brazelton (a noted pediatrician and outspoken supporter of the parental leave and child care bills).”

Thomas Rollins, the counsel and staff director of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s Committee on Labor and Human Resources, said that McLaughlin also had met with Kennedy and even with Senate staff, which is somewhat unusual.

“I have a very good sense about her outreach effort to run an open and engaged Department of Labor,” Rollins said. “There seems to be more labor at Labor.”

But what will come of it is still a big question.

Child Care Task Force

“What I’m trying to do is turn the ship two degrees in the direction of readying the work force for the 1990s,” she said.

One of her first actions was to convene a child care task force, which will release a report in a few weeks.

“It’s going to be slides and graphs and statistics for private sector and state and local government and clear up some misunderstandings about what the universe is. I’m not going to come out with legislation. We’re not there yet. First I want to get into the debate with information and then work with people. I’m committed in that area,” she said.

McLaughlin, who has no children, is sensitive to the fact that parental leave and child care never posed any barriers to her own success. After a brief early marriage to widowed stockbroker Bill Dore, the New Jersey native married conservative television news show host John McLaughlin 13 years ago. Before they married, she helped McLaughlin with his unsuccessful 1970 Senate race in Rhode Island, and he then helped her get a job with Nixon’s re-election campaign, which brought her to Washington. There, she dated Sen. Robert Dole before his marriage to Elizabeth Hanford. The McLaughlins and Doles, often labeled “Washington power couples,” are now good friends. The President has dined at the McLaughlins’ northwest Washington home. Theirs is hardly a common life style.

Yet McLaughlin embraced the child care problem “because of the obviousness of it,” she said.

“I see it as an economic and a business issue. I don’t happen to have children but I have a lot of friends with children. When I familiarized myself with the demographics of the work force over the next 10 years--new workers will be 80% women, minorities and immigrants--it is clear to me that child care and family work issues” would be of great importance.

Nonetheless she opposes a bill before Congress that would require employers to offer parents 10 weeks’ leave without pay after the birth or adoption of a child.

“I’m for parental leave 100%. I’m against it being mandated,” she said. “I think that is reaching into business. It can be a disincentive.

“I know a person with an office of 12 people. He gave four months off with pay to one of his key workers because she was going to have a baby. When I discussed with him the parental leave bill he said, ‘Wait a minute. You mean I didn’t have to pay her?’ I can cite many stories like that, (which suggest that) at the level of employer and employee the best deal can be struck.”

Congressional aides to Democratic members of Congress who deal with employment issues disputed McLaughlin’s optimistic view of how quickly the business community would respond to parental leave and child care needs without legislation to spur them on, especially in the cases of clerical employees who are not as highly valued by their employers as was the woman who negotiated the four-month paid leave. Bills such as the one that mandates parental leave would merely provide “a floor” of minimum benefits and allow parents to negotiate better deals from there, one aide said. “There is a difference between a guaranteed right and a negotiated benefit,” the aide said. But McLaughlin is determined to bring about a solution without legislation.

“I am absolutely committed to the idea that businesses understand what this family-work kind of nexus is now and how it is different than it was before. And I can use the bully pulpit to do that,” McLaughlin said. “I can encourage state and local governments and communities and businesses to do that. I will be calling on more and more unions as part of their collective bargaining to look at the family work issues rather than just press Capitol Hill.”

‘Stifle’ Our Greatness

To mandate such benefits by law would “stifle what makes this country great,” said McLaughlin. “We couldn’t be as creative as the private sector on child care and parental leave.

“As we’re sitting here today child care solutions are developing like mushrooms out there. They are coming on like gangbusters.

“I would hope there is not a need for legislation,” she said.

As an example of how business will be compelled to adapt, McLaughlin cites the case of a shoe company in Boston that “put in a child care center for their employees. The caliber of the people they’re recruiting went way up and the chairman is ecstatic.” Another company in Texas, she said, “put in a child care center and listen to these numbers. This is why business will come along, not because it’s altruism. They had a 12,000-hour savings in lost work time. They had a reduction of 60% in turnover rate and over a two-year period a $2-million savings for the company. That’s powerful stuff.

“If business doesn’t get off the dime then all of us have a reason to say, ‘We’ve got to do something for our people. ‘ I hope and I am sure that won’t happen, because I see too many good things happening out there.”

No Major Complaints

Organized labor officials, perhaps the Labor Department’s strongest foes, have had no major complaints about McLaughlin so far, having said at the time of her nomination that they would not fight it because there was too little time left for her to do much damage. Labor officials were not pleased with her lack of experience in labor issues but she seemed to calm their fears at a February meeting with the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Bal Harbour, Fla.

The meeting, which was closed to the press, was described as cordial and friendly by participants and afterward AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland told reporters, “She gave every indication of being on top of her job. She was well received. I am quite satisfied we’ll have a good working relationship with Secretary McLaughlin.”

McLaughlin’s future beyond the Labor Department looms very bright, and her name gets trotted out whenever people discuss possible women vice presidential candidates. But she says that would not interest her.

“I have absolutely no interest in elective office,” she said. “I don’t have it in my gut, as they say. I also think I benefit by returning to the private sector and I think the government benefits by having me jump in and out a little bit.”