The Association of Washington Business wants Gov. Christine Gregoire to gut a family leave bill waiting for her signature. Don Brunell, president of the business lobby group, wrote the governor last week urging her to veto everything in the bill except the section that calls for a task force to study implementation of family leave. (This from a link on Richard Davis' AWB Olympia Business Watch blog.) Brunell quotes an author Gregoire often cites herself to make the case:

Thomas L. Friedman, author of The World is Flat, commented in a 2005 New York Times essay, "A Race to the Top," on the disparity between the countries of Europe, with stagnant economies and crumbling welfare benefit structures, and our new competitors in eastern and southern Asia — India and China, and the dynamism of their economies. Wrote Thomas, "French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck."

I think of this quote whenever our Legislature considers — or passes — employment regulations that attempt to align us with "the rest of the civilized world," as proponents of paid family leave contend. What the Legislature has done with E2SSB 5659, by contrast, is enact a programmatic mandate that only one other state in our nation, California, has put into place, and one that is entirely foreign to our new global competitors to the east.

As you have noted many times, our state's businesses compete on this global scale. We must be mindful of the regulatory costs that our state imposes upon them that hamper their economic competitiveness. Paid family leave, as envisioned by the Legislature, will be one such cost.

Holly Armstrong, Gregoire's communications director, told me just now the governor is still reviewing the bill, but is expected to sign it and hasn't shown any inclination to strip it down to a study.