Labor Secretary Lauds Study of Productivity : Workplace: Elizabeth Dole fails to embrace many of a blue-ribbon panel’s recommendations to sharpen employees’ skills, however.

Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole on Tuesday praised a bipartisan commission’s study on the nation’s productivity crisis but stopped short of embracing its sweeping and costly recommendations.

“At a time when America faces her stiffest economic competition in history, we are faced with a work-force crisis,” Dole told participants at a New York conference sponsored by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.

“The facts behind this crisis are eloquently detailed in the report we have gathered to discuss,” Dole said. “In short, our work force is in a state of unreadiness--unready for the new challenges, unready for the new complexities, unready for the new realities of the 1990s.”

The commission, headed by former Labor secretaries William E. Brock III and F. Ray Marshall, released a report that, among other things, proposed requiring businesses to spend an amount equal to 1% of their payrolls on training. It also urges the United States to quickly pour tens of billions of dollars into schools and on-the-job training programs.

The study, “America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!,” also calls for the Labor Department to develop industry-based standards for professionally certifying young job seekers after two to four years of study and apprenticeships. All students would be required to earn certificates of academic achievement by age 16.

Dole called the proposals “innovative and far-reaching” but did not endorse some of the more radical recommendations.

“This report will most definitely raise America’s consciousness level, spur public debate and increase our national will to solve this crisis,” Dole said, “although we may, at times, have to agree to disagree on the exact means of getting there.” She did not elaborate on her possible objections.

A commission spokesman had no comment on Dole’s speech.