Su

Biden nominated Julie Su as his new Secretary of Labor, which is a great choice. It’s because she is such an effective activist for workers that she very well may not be confirmed. The gig companies despise her with the hatred of a thousand suns and thanks to Manchin and Sinema, that might be enough. Our friend Michael Hiltzik lays all this out:

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) complains that Julie Su upheld a California workplace law

By any measure, Su, 54, the Stanford- and Harvard-educated daughter of Chinese immigrants, is spectacularly qualified for the permanent position. She has been a stalwart and exceptionally effective advocate for worker rights throughout her professional career.

In 1994, freshly out of law school, Su led the first of 72 Thai garment workers to freedom after their rescue from an El Monte sweatshop and subsequent detention by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

As The Times reported then, she was “foremost among lawyers who had negotiated the workers’ release on bond and found housing and jobs for them.” She then served as the lead attorney in their successful battle to obtain a $4-million settlement from manufacturers and retailers for their exploitation.

The lawsuit was “path-breaking [for] going after not only the sweatshop owners and contractors who were on the front lines of exploitation, but demanding accountability from retailers and wholesalers who were involved in the production chain,” Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, told my colleague Melanie Mason.

Can’t have any of that helping slave laborers escape their servitude! No sir, that’s not how we build an economy based around getting children back in the workforce!

The Republican senators questioning Su repeated, with an astonishing shamelessness, the complaints of gig companies irked by her policies in California and at the Labor Department. These attacks focused on her support of AB 5, the California law enacted to codify the distinction between independent contractors and employees first articulated by the state Supreme Court.

“Miss Su was the chief enforcer of AB 5,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), reading from a page that might as well have been provided by Uber and Lyft, the chief opponents of AB 5. Cassidy called AB 5 a “controversial law that dismantled the gig economy such as Uber, Doordash, Lyft, and removed the flexibility of these individuals to work as independent contractors.”

Oh, right. “Flexibility.” Where have we heard that term before? It’s the standard mantra of the gig companies, which have banded together as the “Flex Association” based on their claim that what gig drivers desire more than anything else is the flexibility to set their own hours — never mind that their rights to unemployment insurance, worker compensation, minimum wage, health coverage and other benefits are trampled in the process.

Other Republicans complained that Su is out to undermine the franchise business model. As she and Weil have both observed, franchising is a model that allows big employers to dodge their responsibilities for workers by claiming that it’s not them but the mom-and-pop franchisees who are guilty of workplace violations.

Su acknowledged that franchising can provide many aspiring entrepreneurs with an entry into business ownership; she could hardly do otherwise, since her own parents owned a franchised pizza restaurant.

Biden administration policy has been aimed at bringing those responsibilities home to the big employers by promoting a joint-employer concept of the relationship.

That’s right and proper, but it sticks in the craw of companies such as McDonald’s that rely on this dodge for profit, just as the skepticism of California and federal regulators about the misclassification of employees as independent contractors sticks in the craw of companies such as Uber and Lyft.

The attacks on Julie Su are predictable. But they prompt us to ponder once again which interests really wield power in the Senate and to ask, if these politicians aren’t standing up for American workers, who do they really represent?

Rupert Murdoch?