ILabor Secretary Marty Walsh is  set to depart from the Biden administration.  He will reportedly be installed as executive director of the NHL Players’ Association.  An official announcement may materialize by the end of the week.  As Walsh prepares to step down, significant regulatory initiatives remain pending at the Department.  These include 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 DOL’s acting head.

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 eclipses any other year in nearly two decades.  And unions’ impressive success rate — winning more than 75% of elections — is the highest in the history of the database.  And the recent organizing activity is not superficial.  It has yielded some 1,200 new bargaining units and 80k new union members, surpassing the totals for the last two years combined.  “If this is the start of a new trend,” the report observes, “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 unions, workers’ rights, and economic justice, a significant, if superficial, departure from the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated both political parties for decades.  Biden recognized that “workers have been getting stiffed” for “too long” as outsourcing and deindustrialization have “hollowed out” the middle class.  He warned that if the GOP controls Congress it would move to dismantle social programs so as to finance tax breaks for the “wealthiest and biggest corporations.”  And in urging Congress to pass the PRO Act, Biden insisted he was “sick and tired of companies breaking the law by preventing workers from organizing,” underscoring that “workers have a right to join a union.”

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) penned an essay in an Orlando newspaper yesterday trumpeting the TEAM Act, a bill he cosponsors that would dismantle the NLRA’s bar on employer domination of labor unions.  Rubio attributes the disconnect between cratering union density and soaring popular support for organized labor to what he casts as “woke activists running America’s major unions.”  As evidence, Rubio asserts that “not a single political issue that the AFL-CIO is involved in receives a majority of workers’ interest.”  The solution, he posits, is to “grant American workers the right to organize outside of the official union framework.”  The piece is unconvincing.  Its core premises collapse under scrutiny and it neglects to acknowledge the significant role Section 8(a)(2) has played in rooting out corruption in the labor movement.  Still, the essay is significant in that it signals that Republicans’ superficial efforts to rebrand as populist class warriors have penetrated the mainstream of GOP politics.