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# GUEST COMMENTARY BY DAN RIZZI Labor Day is not a day of rest for employers
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/guest-commentary-by-dan-rizzi-labor-day-is-not-a-day-of-rest-for-employers/
- Published: 2006-08-31T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T21:21:50.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

As employees across the country take a break for the Labor Day holiday, employers should consider three particularly significant ongoing developments: a dramatic increase in the diversity of the U.S. workforce, spiraling employee health care costs and aggressive union organizing efforts, which, if not handled in a timely and effective manner by employers, may very well make the difference between a company’s competitive success or failure.

The changing face of the U.S. workforce — and its ever increasing diversity — presents both a significant challenge and a substantial opportunity for employers across the country, in small towns as well as in large cities. The successful employer will embrace the diversity of its workforce, and use it to its advantage when developing, marketing and selling itself and its products and services to an increasingly diverse group of customers and clients.

Human resources professionals must lead the way in recruiting, attracting and maintaining a diverse workforce of employees who understand and can comfortably and effectively service the changing markets and communities in which they operate. Rigid rules and inflexibility as to work schedules, benefit programs and other terms and conditions of employment must give way to more enlightened approaches and policies that accommodate the differing and legitimate needs of a diverse workforce, and at the same time contribute to the company’s overall success.

Very few employees with employer-provided health-care benefits fully understand or appreciate just how much it costs their employer to provide those benefits, let alone how much the cost of those benefits have spiraled out of control during the past 10 years. The insurance premiums paid by employers to provide such health care benefits may amount to as much as 50 percent of the total compensation costs — wages plus benefits — for a particular employee. No employer of any size in any industry is immune from facing this issue, and like the price of a gallon of jet fuel to the air-line industry, the price of the health care benefits provided to current and retired employees may spell the difference between financial success and disaster.

Informing and educating employees about their health-care benefits, and about the substantial costs of those benefits, is an important first step by employers in developing innovative programs designed to meet the legitimate health-care needs of their employees, without bankrupting or otherwise making their companies financially uncompetitive.

The recent break-up of the AFL-CIO and the creation of the competing Change to Win union federation will most certainly result in an increase in union organizing activity, even in those parts of the country like the South and Southeast where unions have not traditionally done very well.Unions,large and small,in every industry, have committed substantial sums of money to increasing the percentage of private sector employees who are unionized — a percentage that has reached an all-time low. Non-union employers, large and small, should expect that they will become the focus of such union-organizing activity, including corporate campaigns, and should consider now what that will mean to their operations and what steps they should take. (Dan Rizzi has represented employers exclusively in all types of labor and employment law matters for more than 25 years, and holds a leadership position with Nixon Peabody’s 50-plus attorney, 15-office national labor and employment law practice.)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 31, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/083106.pdf?ref=smdp.com)