Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is  set to depart from the Biden administration; an official announcement may materialize by the end of the week. He will reportedly be installed as executive director of the NHL Players’ Association. Significant regulatory initiatives remain pending at the Department, including proposed FLSA regulations that would expand overtime eligibility and narrow the independent contractor test. Walsh’s exit — which would be the first in Biden’s cabinet — would elevate Deputy Secretary Julie Su as the Department’s acting leader.

In organizing news, Bloomberg Law’s freshly released 2022 NLRB election data concretely reflects that organizing activities accelerated significantly last year. The number of union election victories exceeded any other year in nearly two decades. And unions’ impressive rate of success — winning more than 75% of the time — is the highest in the history of the database. The data makes clear that the wave of organizing momentum is not a mirage, as it has yielded nearly 1,200 new bargaining units and 80k new members. This eclipses the totals for the last two years combined. “If this is the start of a new trend,” the report concludes, “it could change the game for labor relations.”

President Biden delivered his 2023 state of the union address last night, using the platform to showcase his rhetorical emphasis on labor and economic justice. Biden recognized that “workers have been getting stiffed” for “too long,” as outsourcing and deindustrialization have “hollowed out” the middle class. He warned that the GOP, should it secure control of Congress, intends to dismantle social programs and cut taxes for the “wealthiest and biggest corporations.” And, urging Congress to pass the PRO Act, he insisted he was “sick and tired of companies breaking the law by preventing workers from organizing” and underscored that “workers have a right to join a union.” This rhetoric marks a significant, if largely oratorical, departure from the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated both parties for decades.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) attempted to strike a populist note in an essay he published in an Orlando newspaper yesterday. The piece trumpets the TEAM Act, a bill Rubio cosponsors that would unwind the NLRA’s bar on employer domination of unions. In the essay, Rubio recognizes the tension between cratering union density and soaring support for organized labor. He attributes the disconnect to what he casts as the “woke activists running America’s major unions.” In support of this theory, Rubio posits that “not a single political issue that the AFL-CIO is involved in receives a majority of workers’ interest.” The solution, he reasons, is to “grant American workers the right to organize outside of the official union framework.”

On the merits, the piece fails to persuade for obvious reasons. Its premises collapse under minimal scrutiny and it misses the important role Section 8(a)(2) played in uprooting corruption from the labor movement. Still, it is significant in that it signals that Republican politicians’ increasingly vogue, and deeply superficial, efforts to rebrand as populist class warriors are penetrating the mainstream of GOP politics.