Child Care, Equal Pay Top Agenda for Working Women : Labor: White House devises strategy to reduce stress, eliminate discrimination and provide training opportunities.

Increasing the supply and quality of child care and promoting fair pay for women were cited Monday as the top priorities of the Clinton Administration’s efforts to improve conditions for working women.

Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and Karen Nussbaum, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, formulated an eight-point strategy in response to a survey of 250,000 working women that was released last year. The “Working Women Count” survey showed that although women said they enjoyed their jobs, changes in the workplace were needed to reduce stress, eliminate discrimination and provide better job-training opportunities.

The initiatives include establishing a new fair-pay information clearinghouse, initiating a partnership with the National League of Cities to increase the supply and quality of child care, creating a pension-education campaign to help women and men plan for retirement and increasing women’s access to education and job training.

On the legislative side, the Labor Department will continue to lobby for a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage and a $500-per-child tax credit for working families earning up to $75,000 a year. The House of Representatives has already passed a tax credit for families earning up to $200,000.

But because legislators on Capitol Hill appear more inclined to eliminate rather than create government programs, the bulk of the recommendations are geared toward dispersing information and helping local communities find innovative solutions to suit their needs, Nussbaum said.

“What we are doing is providing an essential service in gathering information about models that work and making it available along with technical assistance,” Nussbaum said. Advocates for working women hailed the Labor Department for highlighting the unique problems of the 60 million women who compose 47% of the American work force. But some doubted that the proposed changes would have much impact.

“The question is whether these recommendations will be window dressing or whether they will make employers deal with the issues,” said Gail Kaufman, associate director of Equal Rights Advocates in San Francisco. “Information certainly is power, but then (women) need resources in order to assert themselves.”

But others called the recommendations “pragmatic,” considering the conservative climate on Capitol Hill.

“The solutions that we need are much bigger than these,” said Ellen Bravo, executive director of 9-to-5 National Assn. of Working Women, based in Milwaukee. “But we also have political reality, and we want them (in the Labor Department) to spend their time on things that they can win.”

To combat what it says is the widespread practice of paying women less than men for comparable work, the Women’s Bureau will establish a toll-free hot line and a site on the Internet to help workers and employers swap information about establishing equitable pay plans, Nussbaum said. She expects this clearinghouse to have a greater impact on working women than the Fair Pay Act of 1995, which was introduced in Congress last week but already seems doomed.

On the child-care front, Nussbaum plans to work with the National League of Cities to identify and “remove obstacles that stand in the way of providing better access to child care--problems like zoning ordinances, liability and licenses,” she said.

San Francisco passed an ordinance several years ago that requires owners of new buildings to set aside space for child-care services or pay into a city fund to increase the supply of care for working parents, Nussbaum said. The Labor Department wants to promote that kind of creative thinking through a series of community forums, she said.

Nussbaum also plans to establish a national honor roll to recognize people who are improving the workplace for women and to reduce wage discrimination among federal contractors by making it easier to report those suspected of underpaying women.

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