Julie Su’s incompetence as California’s labor secretary during the COVID-19 pandemic cost the state $32 billion to unemployment insurance fraud. She ought to have been fired.
Instead, President Joe Biden appointed her deputy U.S. labor secretary in Feb. 2021 and she was confirmed that July. After Secretary Marty Walsh resigned, she became acting secretary. In Feb. 2023 she was nominated by the president for the post. But her poor performance in California held up the nomination.
On Feb. 27 the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted to advance her nomination to the full Senate, where it will soon be considered. The vote was 11 Democrats to 10 Republicans.
Committee Chair Bernie Sanders of Vermont held the hearings behind closed doors. Why the secrecy? This is labor policy, not nuclear policy. Bernie’s own website cites his calls for “transparency” in the operations of oil companies and U.S. trade policy. The hypocrisy is staggering, but not surprising.
In California, Su enforced the horrible Assembly Bill 5, which canceled the rights of “gig” workers to act as independent contractors. In 2019, she boasted her agency would “be doing investigations and audits” because gig work is “not the kind of economy we want in California.”
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As acting secretary, Su also has advanced anti-worker policies. The Wall Street Journal reported she backs the Protecting the Right to Organize Act: “This coercive bill would strip workers of their right to decline to join a union, which more than half of states protect.” The PRO Act also would end the right to secret-ballot votes, as already was done last year in California against farm workers when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 113.
Although the U.S. unemployment rate is a low 3.7%, in California for January it was a relatively high 5.1%, and rising. That scored second worst among the states after Nevada’s 5.4%. The Newsom-Su policies of recent years ought not be extended to the whole country. We urge California Sens. Laphonza Butler and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, to reject Su’s nomination.
California has suffered enough already from her anti-worker policies.