Angela Rowlings/The Boston Herald via AP
Joe Biden and others look on during the inauguration of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, January 2018.
During the week before Christmas, I wrote a piece handicapping the prospects of the various figures hoping to become President Biden’s secretary of labor. Of the leading candidates, I noted that Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was the clear favorite of old-line labor, given his background heading that city’s building trades unions before he became mayor. I also noted that California Labor Secretary Julie Su and former SEIU official, Obama staffer, Ambassador to South Africa, and Open Society Foundations President Patrick Gaspard were more representative of the new face of labor, at least demographically.
Given those various pedigrees, I wrote that I understood Walsh’s support from AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, but that I found his support from AFSCME President Lee Saunders and AFT President Randi Weingarten—progressive leaders of powerful progressive unions—to be somewhat inexplicable. During the Christmas break, however, I pondered that last judgment and decided to reverse it. Their support for Walsh is entirely explicable, and for good reasons.
First, while it’s true that Walsh comes from and has represented that part of the labor movement that remains disproportionately white, male, and relatively conservative, particularly in Eastern cities, his own work in that movement has been to push the trades into the 21st century. As mayor, Walsh prodded the city council to approve his proposal requiring construction companies working on public projects or private projects exceeding 50,000 square feet to have 51 percent of their workers’ hours go to city residents, 40 percent to minorities, and 12 percent to women. He has also pushed the building trades into supporting a host of progressive causes.
“He’s been at the forefront when it comes to promoting people of color, making sure people of color have a fair shake,” Saunders told me. “I can’t speak more highly of him.”
Which is to say, Walsh occupies a very special and important niche in the Democrats’ ecosystem. Unlike the overwhelming majority of today’s leading Democrats, he is of the white working class, championing its workers’ interests while also working to align its perspectives with the needs and goals of today’s more multiracial and less predominantly male working class. It’s easy to see why Biden should want at least one prominent member of his administration to credibly play that role. Subsequently, it’s easy to see why he would want Walsh at Labor.
Saunders and Weingarten head the AFL-CIO’s most politically active and savvy unions, and the unique political role that Walsh could play is not lost on them. But that’s not the only reason they say they support him.
“With his background both in labor and as a big-city mayor, he understands how to get things done,” says Weingarten. Like Saunders, she’s known Walsh for years, and points to his skills as a listener and his ability to translate people’s needs and desires into public policy. It’s precisely those qualities, she adds, that documentarian Frederick Wiseman captured in City Hall, the new four-hour film that recorded the workings of Boston city government in 2018 and 2019, and that repeatedly displays Walsh’s capacity for both empathy and action.
Saunders and Weingarten both speak highly of Patrick and Su, neither of whom had emerged as candidates for the DOL post when they endorsed Walsh. But what distinguishes Walsh from the field, in their minds, is not only the unique political space he’s carved out for himself, nor his ability to run a large and diverse bureaucracy. It’s also that he’s been close to Biden for decades, and as such would have “a seat at Biden’s table when decisions are made,” Saunders says.
That’s a proximity that labor secretaries have seldom enjoyed. (Clinton labor secretary and American Prospect co-founder Robert Reich was an old friend of the president, but found himself pushing against a rightward-flowing tide.) “We need a secretary who can lever up workers’ concerns in every discussion of economic policy,” Weingarten says. “He’d have the kind of access that [Labor Secretary] Frances Perkins had with Franklin Roosevelt.”
Among FDR’s many aides, it was Perkins above all others who prodded him to create Social Security, and the vast public-employment programs that rebuilt much of America during his presidency. She was already a respected counselor to Roosevelt when he came to the White House, having been a leading worker advocate in New York state for decades, and then Roosevelt’s labor secretary when he was the state’s governor. Biden’s relationship with Walsh—they’re both working-class boys made good—is even longer than FDR’s with Perkins, and by multiple accounts, Walsh is someone the president-elect relies on for counsel.
“Workers need power and a voice that matters at the highest levels of government,” says Weingarten. That’s the case for Marty Walsh.
