Labor 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. The data further reveals that the recent organizing wave is not a mirage, as 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, which marks a significant, if largely oratorical, departure from the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated both 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 should the GOP secure control of Congress it would move swiftly to dismantle social programs and cut taxes 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 is designed to dismantle the NLRA’s bar on employer domination of labor unions. Interestingly, Rubio recognizes the discordance between cratering union density and soaring popular 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 assertion, 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.”

For obvious reasons, the piece fails to persuade. Its premises collapse upon minimal scrutiny, and it overlooks the legitimate and significant role Section 8(a)(2) played in uprooting corruption from the labor movement. Still, the essay is significant in that it appears to signal that Republicans’ superficial efforts to rebrand as populist class warriors have penetrated the mainstream of GOP politics.