I suspect over the next few days and weeks, we’ll start having nostalgia for the movie, 2010. It was a fun little movie that seemed ground-breaking at the time, but now just seems a little dated.
But do you remember the tagline for the movie? It was "The Year We Make Contact".
Although the movie came out in 1984, I’m going to make my big prediction for the upcoming year: We’re not making contact with aliens.
Seems like an easy enough prediction.
Ah, but you say, what about employment law? Well, the crystal ball is not so clear.
I suppose the easy way out is to talk about new legislation that may come about such as the Employee Free Choice Act. But so far, I really haven’t seen any indication that the White House is particularly excited about that proposed piece of legislation.
While President Obama has said that he supports it, a search for the term reveals scant evidence of that on the White House website. (Compare that search with one for "discrimination" and you’ll get a sense of how little the White House talks about EFCA.)
So, I’m going to take a page out of Kevin O’Keefe’s recent post entitled "Why Predict the Future When You Can Make It?" In it he repeats an oft-reminded, yet seldom followed, expression: The Future is What You Make Of It. As he said: "Good luck in 2010. But remember luck is the residue of design and hard work."
For employers, there will always been the next case or new law that will need to be tracked and followed, but employers that follow best practices in employment law can worry less about those developments and more about the big picture. The employers that can focus on attracting and keeping the best employees will succeed — no matter what the other developments are during the year.
With that, I wish you all a very Happy New Year.