Labor
"I certainly will do everything I can to push for more and better laws to protect the working man who is the backbone of our country." Harrison A. Williams, Jr., Remarks before the N.J. State AFL-CIO Legislative Conference, 24 March 1969.
With education positioning more Americans to be gainfully employed and more sophisticated participants in the nation's economy, it was essential that workplace practices be modified to support the Great Society's social goals. Williams sponsored legislation throughout his career aimed at ensuring justice for Americans in employment matters. Traditional practices of employment discrimination based on age, sex, race, and other factors were outlawed. Exploitative or abusive workplace practices were at least mitigated through legislation establishing minimum wages, occupational safety and health standards, and private pension protections. Williams advocated an active role for the federal government—via program and project funding and regulation—in ensuring that these broad social goals were accomplished within the essential framework of private enterprise. In response to cyclical economic downturns, government spending on projects and public employment were viewed as correctives and as productive alternatives to direct welfare payments.
Photograph, Harrison Williams at the opening of the Stock Brokerage Clerk Program, Newark (N.J.) Manpower Training Skills Center, September 1968.
Williams recommended that Wall Street firms facing chronic openings for brokerage clerk jobs seek to fill those positions with the unemployed from Newark. Government funding was provided and the securities industry did the training at a New Jersey state government agency location. This model, consisting of federal and state funding and facilitating resources combined with private expertise, was one often used in the Great Society programs. (Photo from State of New Jersey, Department of Education, Newark Manpower Training Skills Center)
AFL-CIO advertisement supporting Williams’s Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), Hudson Dispatch, 27 October 1970.
In 1969-1970, three major workplace safety bills introduced by Williams and approved by his Subcommittee on Labor were enacted, including OSHA, the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, and the Federal Construction Safety Act
Cover of The failure of refuse dams on Middle Fork, Buffalo Creek, part I of II. An engineering survey of representative coal mine refuse piles as related to the Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, disaster. U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor, May 1972.
Though mine safety legislation was passed in 1969, mine disasters continued to occur, including those at Sunshine Silver Mine in Idaho where 91 men were killed in an underground fire and Scotia mine in Kentucky where 26 died in an explosion. In 1972, 125 residents were killed in a flood at Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, when a dam built of mine refuse collapsed. Investigations of the various tragedies indicated that strengthened enforcement of the laws was needed, leading to the 1977 passage of Williams's Federal Mine Safety and Health Amendments Act. This act was the last significant mine safety legislation for 30 years, until the law was amended in 2006 in response to the Sago Mine and other disasters of that year.
First page of S. 1861, A bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended, to extend its protection to additional employees, to raise the minimum wage to $2.25 an hour, to provide for an eight-hour workday, and for other purposes, 13 May 1971.
One of Williams's minimum wage bills.
First page of S. 2515, A bill to further promote equal employment opportunities for American workers, 28 October 1971.
Williams's bill, as reported by his committee, strengthening the civil rights enforcement capability of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
News from U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams, [No.] 74-119, “Williams labels pension reform signing ‘historic moment.’”
After several years of legislative effort, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, known as ERISA, was signed into law. The law established regulatory standards concerning pension benefits promised to employees by private employers and was a response to the inadequacies of many such plans. The law has been amended over the years, including in 1986 when it was expanded to provide group health insurance continuation coverage rights to employees, rights popularly known as “COBRA.”
Photograph, N.J. State A.F.L.-C.I.O, N.J. State Building Trades, March for Jobs, Trenton, 29 July 1974.
In response to high unemployment in the construction industry, 18,000 workers rallied in Trenton to call for more jobs. Williams sought a managed balance between development and conservation. But the political difficulty of this balance can be seen in this rally. The workers wanted more public works and less emphasis on environmental considerations in considering construction projects. Both Governor Brendan Byrne and Williams addressed the rally. Williams agreed that public works were necessary, but that they should be oriented toward pollution control.