Secretive Su: Biden Admin Won’t Release Records of ‘Transparent’ Labor Secretary Nominee Julie Su

The confirmation of acting labor secretary Julie Su to lead the agency on a permanent basis faces an uphill battle in the closely divided Senate. Conservative watchdog group American Accountability Foundation last month petitioned the Labor Department for all official correspondence between Su and the nation’s most powerful unions, whose business dominates her public calendars. Last week, the agency blew by its deadline to provide the documents as Su moved toward a confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate.

The Biden administration’s failure to provide documents from Su’s time at the Labor Department ahead of a potential vote “thickens the cloud already hanging over this confirmation process.”

The Labor Department’s lack of timely transparency cuts against Su’s own defense of her record. Under questioning from Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) in a confirmation hearing last month, Su described herself as “someone who is communicative, transparent, and really sees that there is tremendous areas of common ground between employers who are job creators and employees who do the work.”

Su’s public calendars, on which American Accountability Foundation based its information requests, suggest that she has maintained the kinds of close ties to unions that she cultivated during her rise in California’s Democratic politics, where public employee unions hold massive sway.

Close Ties to Unions

• Su has a quarterly check-in with Neal Bisno, the president of the SEIU.
• She joined a May 12, 2022 SEIU “wage theft” event in support of a controversial bill then moving through the California legislature to hand power over fast food wages and benefits to a special state council.
• Su notably had zero meetings with business leaders as deputy labor secretary.

Meanwhile, Su’s calendars also showcase her commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. For example, she participated in a meeting about “equity in procurement”—to ensure that government contracts go to business owners who are not white or straight—and a panel about incorporating gender and race into workplace safety.

Su was an early supporter of critical race theory, an academic idea that Western society is inherently racist. In a recently unearthed essay, she and a co-author decried the notions of “colorblindness” and “individuality.”

Last April, per her calendars, Su met with Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, the former California lawmaker who now leads one of the state’s most powerful unions. Gonzalez Fletcher authored California’s controversial “gig worker” law, AB 5, which was meant to improve work conditions for independent contractors but led to job losses and pay cuts for many of them.