Julie Su Is Still Optimistic About the Future of Labor

Su may still be stuck in ​“acting” purgatory for now, but the Wisconsin-born, second generation Chinese American attorney has never let partisan bickering get in the way of her ambitious agenda. Boardrooms and corporate union-busters don’t scare her; she began her career as a human rights lawyer in California, where she was the lead on the El Monte Thai garment slavery civil case (which ultimately ended in a $4 million settlement for the trafficked workers).

She’s managed to get an incredible amount done in that short time, from partnering with the Mine Safety and Health Administration to implement a life-saving silica dust exposure rule to personally showing up at the bargaining table to help workers at Boeing, USMX, Blue Bird electric vehicles, and more win historic new contracts.

She’s also an optimist. Even with an aggressively anti-worker new administration looming just around the corner, Su refuses to give up hope in labor’s future. I caught up with her briefly over the phone at the end of December, a few days after Frances Perkins popped up in the news with a brand-new national monument.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’ve been serving as the Acting Labor Secretary for less than two years, but it feels like you really did a lot with that time (and if you’d gotten a four-year extension, you’d be putting up Frances Perkins numbers). Looking back, what are some of your proudest accomplishments during this term?

[Recently] we had the President at the Department of Labor in the Frances Perkins Building announce that Frances Perkins’ childhood home is going to be a national monument. That’s going to help people get to know her story and learn about how important she was, and to me, it’s a reflection of something I say all the time, that how we use our power really matters. For me, working for a president that was very clear about how workers have to be prioritized in everything we do — from where we put federal dollars to who we talk about and how we build our economy, it had to center workers first — made my job more important than it could have been. It allowed me to really bring the full force of my position and the department for the good of working people.

Part of the job is about making sure that we set in place clear standards. So the silica rule we’ve talked about, that was decades in the making. We got it done. We announced it in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, alongside the mine workers union and alongside miners themselves. Many of them said, ​“I’m 35 years old. I didn’t know how long I would live, but now I know that I can be protected and grow old, to raise my kids and see my grandkids.” That was really important. And we put in place similar standards for farm workers, for overtime, for mental health; we issued the first nationwide standard to protect workers from the hazards of heat. Putting in place strong standards is really important. It’s kind of the Frances Perkins equivalent, right? She said, ​‘I’m going to make sure we have a nationwide minimum wage, I’m going to set in place Social Security and unemployment insurance.’ We didn’t have a Congress willing to do a lot of the things that we were trying to do. So we use the powers that we had to put some in place.

The other part is enforcement. We unleashed patterns of violation inspections to make sure that employers knew that if they had made it a business practice to break the law and put their workers at risk, the message was, not on my watch. We’re not allowing that to happen. By doing real enforcement, we collected over a billion dollars for workers who had experienced wage theft. That’s real money going where it belongs, in workers pockets. This President was very clear that when unions are strong, America is strong, and just him saying that really mattered. But it was my job to make sure that it wasn’t just words, that it was real. We made sure that unions were always at the table in everything that we did. We made sure unions were helping to set policy. I came to the bargaining table more times than many of my predecessors combined because this president said, we believe in collective bargaining. And I came, not to pressure the parties to reach agreement, but to help make sure that contracts reflected workers’ true value. We made incredible progress for working people, from health care to hospitality, airline flight attendants to auto workers, delivery drivers, dock workers — all of them locked in historic gains in contracts that are going to last for the next four years or more. That’s a big deal.

And then, of course, the good jobs piece. I’m very proud of the fact that we cared not just about the number of jobs that were created, but that the jobs were good jobs, where workers can come home healthy and safe, make a decent living, and retire with security and dignity. The incredible federal investments under the President’s Investing In America agenda is helping to make that a reality. I visited so many projects that have broken ground, airports that were being modernized, apprenticeship programs bursting at the seams, that were a reflection of that.

It was only after I really started paying close attention to the inner workings of agencies like MSHA and the DOL that I realized just how much the personnel involved really, really matters in terms of what actually happens. Some of these agency workers will be protected by their most recent union contracts for at least a few more years, but have there been any other kind of safeguards put in place to ensure that all of this great progress and all these great programs won’t get rolled back or ignored?

The heartbeat of the federal agencies are the career employees: the people who come in every day, year after year, and work to fulfill the mission. It’s been very gratifying for me to get to know many of them, to work alongside them, and to have them feel how important it is when they can unleash their power, right? They come here because they want to do their job. They want to fulfill the mission. It’s the Department of Labor’s 15,000-strong workforce that’s going to keep on breathing life into the standards and enforcing laws that are already in place.

It should be uncontroversial that children age 16 — or 13!— shouldn’t be working under dangerous conditions. That’s the law. It shouldn’t be controversial that when workers go to work, they should be paid what they earned. It shouldn’t be controversial that when somebody earns a retirement over a lifetime of work, that that retirement is there for them at the end of their career. The best failsafe is the people who work in this department who will keep on doing their jobs.

Not to be a bummer, but it sounds like now we have to be a little more anxious, because one of the stated goals of the incoming administration is to get rid of all of those workers.

Yeah, I know. If the next administration wants to create a strong economy, we have proven that the strongest economy comes from putting workers first, the strongest economy comes from investing in good jobs and making sure every job is a good job. And so if they’re serious about what they’ve said, having a Department of Labor that can fulfill its mission is really critical.

I was so happy when the department finally got the silica rule through — and that took decades and multiple administrations to get to that point. For you, what’s left unfinished? What do you wish you had more time to work on?

Well, it takes decades to reverse an economy that has not worked for working people, right? This president has really spoken out about the failures of a trickle-down economic system, he’s been really good about that. Telling workers that they just have to wait for things to flow to them while policies benefited CEOs and the rich is a version of an economy that we wholesale rejected. But it takes more than four years to reverse the impacts of those kinds of economic policies that have disfavored the working class. So we started that, but yes, there was a lot of work that we still needed to do. The job is unfinished. Just to use the heat rule as an example, it’s been noticed, but it has not been completed. It needs to be completed. Now, having gotten as far as we got, will put a marker down for the next administration. If they don’t finish it, that’s going to be a choice.

Many of the federal investments that we’re talking about are just beginning to hit the ground now, and the impact at scale is going to be felt in, you know, about two years. All the seeds that we planted, all of the nurturing, the watering, the care to get to this point will really bear fruit in the next couple of years. But the president has also said he was willing to – and knew that we had to – invest big in long term changes to really build a worker centered economy. So, there’s definitely more work on that to do, even just on enforcing the law. There are now 400,000 union workers that were not in unions when we came to office. Union election petitions have doubled. Unions are more popular than they’ve been in decades, yet the vast majority of workers in this country are not part of a union, and those workers deserve dignity too. Those workers should get to feel their power. And a big part of that is making sure that there’s a strong federal government that enforces the laws and makes sure that standards aren’t just words on paper. That work still needs to be done.

Imagine what you could’ve gotten done without so many anti-worker politicians in Congress getting in the way.

That’s one of the lessons of Frances Perkins too, right? You do big, bold things that really create a floor for working people, so that nobody falls under it. You can create an environment in which worker safety and nationwide attention to the wellbeing of workers is the norm — and you can really do that when you have Congress willing to work with you to pass legislation. I think what this president was able to get done with limited support, including federal investments that are really historic in nature, were phenomenal, but the work is unfinished for sure.

A big part of the unfinished work is also investments in our care economy. Care should be treated like infrastructure, just like physical roads and bridges. It’s something that people need, it’s something that we should not leave up to chance, it shouldn’t be individuals trying to figure it out on their own. It is one area that requires significant federal investment, and that work has also not been done.

There’s progress that’s been made. States are doing a lot of it. We’re going to look to states to show what is possible in the next few years, right? My optimistic side says that, because they want to set a floor so that people who live in their states don’t fall under it, that states will continue to advance the policies and work with their communities to enforce them. It’s going to show what can be done. A federal government that ignores those examples will do so at their peril. You can’t say you’re pro-worker and then crush worker organizing. You can’t pretend to be pro-worker and stand against policies that advance workers’ rights.

What do you think will be some of the biggest challenges facing labor in the years ahead?

I’ve met with workers all over the country and working people want what working people have always wanted: a fair shot. They want to be valued for the work that they do. In too many places, that is still not the reality. And so my hope is that the era of worker power that we’ve helped usher in — where workers have been able to organize, where union contracts help to lift up not just wages and working conditions for union workers, but for industries, and where we’ve been very clear that federal money should not be blank checks to corporations, they should benefit everybody – that those things have set a new floor.

I also think of raising the floor as raising the standards for what the federal government can and should do. What are the expectations for a labor secretary and a Labor Department? I have hope that we’ve demonstrated those things will not be undone right away.

You’ve mentioned hope a lot, and staying optimistic. You’ve been in the belly of the beast for a few years, but you come out of the union world, and I’m sure you’ve dealt with much tougher things than whatever goes on inside a federal agency. How do you hold on to that optimism and that hope when labor and workers have accomplished so much, but still have so far to go?

Because I have seen what can happen. I’ve seen workers themselves transform their working conditions, their industry, their communities. I’ve worked alongside workers who, their whole life, they’ve been told to just keep your head down and know your place, and I have seen over and over again that when those workers are given the opportunities to truly demand what they deserve, it’s really transformative. It changes people’s lives. It makes things better. And I’ve seen that in circumstances where people had really no reason to hope for it. I’m hopeful because I’ve seen what happens.

I also have seen that so often people in power will say, ​‘Oh, we can’t do a thing because workers are too afraid or workers are too vulnerable.’ And there’s going to be some very vulnerable communities in the months and years ahead, right? What’s being said about immigrants and undocumented immigrants is unconscionable. It’s sending terror throughout communities. And those who’ve been vulnerable, right, like workers who work in dangerous conditions and Black workers who have been excluded from real opportunity for so long. There’s going to be some real challenges, but those are the very people who have risen up in the past, and against all odds, made tremendous change and have pushed our country forward and have made progress possible.

So my answer when people say, ​‘Well, you know, workers are too vulnerable,’ is that it’s not that workers have been too scared. It’s people in power, people in government, who have not been brave enough to stand beside them. And so the ability to do that, for me, has been an honor. At the very least, I should bring the hope that they bring, and the belief that we can all use our power to make things better. Fight like hell, right?