We still didn't know at press time who the next president will be, but it's not difficult to speculate what our nation's capital will be like given the evenly divided Congress.

When it comes to lawmaking, working people and their unions probably can expect that not much will change, good or bad. An evenly divided Congress means both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to work together to get anything of significance accomplished. Controversial legislation that strays too far into helping or hindering the business or worker interests is likely to get quashed.

But make no bones about it: it matters a great deal whether we have a Democratic or Republican president.

Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Bray said that when the next president takes office without a decisive majority in Congress, "deals will have to be cut." But, he continued, "a win is still a win - as Bill Clinton has amply proved. With the single exception of welfare reform, Mr. Clinton has managed to dominate Congress and set much of the national agenda."

Speaking Nov. 18 at the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, Frank Swoboda, veteran labor reporter for The Washington Post, predicted labor would continue to defeat GOP anti-worker moves on Capitol Hill: because while such legislation is a low business priority, killing it is a top union priority, and unions showed some clout in the Nov. 7 election. Senate filibusters and President Clinton's vetoes stopped past GOP attempts to push its anti-worker agenda.

However, with legislative inaction looming, Swoboda said "the battle will be in the regulatory area and the stakes will be fairly large."

Especially for the unionized construction industry. The profits and paychecks in construction are always closely tied to the world of politics, and that fact came more into focus after the Nov. 7 election.

Randel Johnson of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Patrick Cleary of the National Association of Manufacturers both told the Construction Labor Report that the slim margins in Congress "limit the degree of change that may be achieved."

However, that doesn't mean they won't try hard to get what they want, and their wish list under a George W. Bush administration would be the repeal of a Clinton memorandum allowing federal agencies to use union-only project agreements on large and significant federally funded construction projects.

Business groups will also:

• Renew their push to allow hourly employees to choose to receive compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay. The sticking point on this proposal has always been that Republicans would allow employers to decide when workers would be able to take their comp time.
• Continue to try to amend the National Labor Relations Act. Included would be efforts to establish "employee involvement programs," as well as a bid to outlaw the organizing tactic of "salting."
• Reform the Family and Medical Leave Act - an extremely popular law with the American public - to tighten the definition of a serious health condition and limit the application of the intermittent leave provision.

In reality, Johnson said that any movement on labor issues will take the form of "very narrow changes to the law."

The next president will still have enormous power in having the ability to appoint Supreme Court justices, panelists on the National Labor Relations Board, Equal Opportunity Commission, and numerous other federal agencies. The makeup of the Supreme Court is obviously the most important of those, but the NLRB also interprets a wide-range of labor laws that can affect workers' wages, working conditions and ability to strike.