In today’s news and commentary, the U.S. Labor Secretary to step down; Biden emphasizes economic justice in State of the Union; new report shows that unions won a record number of elections last year; and a conservative Senator proposes labor law reform.

In the coming days, Marty Walsh is reportedly set to depart from his role as U.S. Secretary of Labor for the top job at the NHL Players’ Association. Although the precise date of the Secretary’s departure remains uncertain, sources disclose that an official announcement may arrive before the end of the week. As Walsh prepares to step down, notable regulatory initiatives remain pending in the Department, which include, among others, proposed FLSA regulations that would expand overtime eligibility and circumscribe the statute’s definition of independent contractor. Walsh’s exit would constitute the first by a member of Biden’s cabinet, and it would leave Deputy Secretary Julie Su in charge of the DOL as the Department’s acting head.

President Joe Biden delivered his 2023 State of the Union address last night, in which he sounded notes of economic justice and called on Congress to adopt prolabor legislation. “For too long,” Biden asserted, “workers have been getting stiffed” and “the middle class” has been “hollowed out.” The President affirmed that “workers have a right to join a union” and, to that end, urged Congress to pass the PRO Act. Moreover, he asserted that “the wealthiest and biggest corporations” must “pay their fair share.” Nevertheless, despite the alarming economic trends he identified, the president concluded his speech by insisting that he has “never been more optimistic about the future of America.”

Bloomberg Law’s newly compiled 2022 NLRB Election Statistics data may offer a measure of optimism to labor partisans. According to the numbers, unions won more Board elections in 2022 than in any year since 2005, and their success rate—76 percent—is the highest on record. Indeed, the number of elections in which unions prevailed in 2022 exceeds the total number conducted in three of the last five years. Moreover, those nearly 1,200 union victories yielded more than 75,000 new union members, a figure which surpasses the total number of employees organized in the prior two years combined. “If this is the start of a new trend,” Bloomberg Law remarks, “it could change the game for labor relations.” These findings reflect the reality that following decades of skyrocketing economic inequality, an overwhelming majority of U.S. workers now desire union representation. While, absent statutory reform, it may be difficult to envisage a widespread resurgence of organized labor, the emerging sense of class injustice underlying last year’s extraordinary organizing success remains an exciting development, one that likely constitutes a necessary precondition to any labor revitalization.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) published an op-ed in an Orlando newspaper yesterday promoting the TEAM Act, a bill he has sponsored which is designed to narrow the scope of the NLRA’s proscription of company-dominated unions. In his essay, Rubio ascribes the discrepancy between the decline in union density and the overwhelming popularity presently enjoyed by the labor movement to the “woke activists running America’s major unions,” who, he contends, represent the interests of “white, college-educated elites.” For this reason, Rubio insists, “Big Labor” fails to safeguard workers’ rights, a reality reflected in the fact that “not a single political issue that the AFL-CIO is involved in receives a majority of workers’ interest.” The solution, then, Senator Rubio contends, is to “grant American workers the right to organize outside of the official union framework.”

Although some labor scholars have suggested that compressing Section 8(a)(2)’s strictures may benefit unions, Rubio’s argument is factually as well as logically defective in significant respects. First, it is an empirical reality that unions secure better wages and benefits for their working class members, and recent polls reveal that, contrary to a central premise on which Rubio’s argument rests, a majority of U.S. workers would support a union in their workplace if given the opportunity. Indeed, if existing unions were so alienating to U.S. employees, organized labor would presumably not be, as Rubio concedes it is, “more popular than it has ever been.” Moreover, many of the policy positions unions espouse—raising the minimum wage, for example—yield broad public support. In any case, Rubio’s essay exemplifies the ongoing efforts of many conservative politicians to recast the Republican Party as a voice of the working class. Thus, it is insightful insofar as it demonstrates the potency with which the issues of labor rights and economic inequality have resurfaced in the national consciousness and political discourse. There may indeed be a basis for tentative optimism if the working class’s struggles for a fairer economic order have become so politically salient that even conservative senators are scrambling to embrace them.