Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo
California Labor Secretary Julie Su in April 2019
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on the most ambitious pro-union platform since Franklin Roosevelt. Labor activists hope that he’ll also pick the most pro-worker secretary of labor since FDR selected Frances Perkins for the job.
The one leading candidate who best fits that description is California Labor Secretary Julie Su, whose candidacy is being avidly promoted by the state’s labor and immigrant rights activists. Like Perkins, Su became an acclaimed public figure as an advocate for immigrant sweatshop workers and has spent her career fighting for workers’ rights and a fair economy. And like Perkins, Su has been witness to an almost unfathomable outrage inflicted on workers.
Perkins, the nation’s first female Cabinet member, held the post from 1933 to 1945, during the Great Depression and World War II. She was the longest-serving and most influential labor secretary in the nation’s history. Perkins championed many of the New Deal’s boldest programs, including Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour workweek, and the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to unionize.
Perkins grew up in a comfortable middle-class Republican household, but while attending Mount Holyoke College, she was deeply influenced by an economic-history course that required her to visit factories in the nearby industrial city of Holyoke and interview workers about their working conditions. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and worked at Hull House, a pioneering social agency that helped immigrants living in slums and toiling in sweatshops. One of her duties was to try to collect wages for workers who had been cheated by their employers, a responsibility that took her into the homes of the city’s poorest residents.
In March 1911, the 30-year-old Perkins witnessed firsthand the fire that engulfed the top floors of a ten-story building housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, one of New York City’s largest garment factories, which employed immigrant young women and girls in overcrowded conditions.
Perkins saw workers huddled on the top floors unable to escape because the exit doors had been locked from the outside and there were no fire escapes. She saw other workers hanging from the windows by their hands, clinging desperately. She noticed that the city fire truck ladders could not reach the top floors, and she witnessed the awful sight of workers jumping or falling to their deaths. In total, 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, died in the Triangle Fire. The experience of witnessing that tragedy, Perkins later explained, “seared on my mind as well as my heart—a never-to-be-forgotten reminder of why I had to spend my life fighting conditions that could permit such a tragedy.” She subsequently advocated successfully for pioneering worker-safety laws in New York state and served as Roosevelt’s labor commissioner when he was New York’s governor.
Su’s career trajectory bears some striking similarities to Perkins’s. Born in 1969 to Chinese immigrants who owned a laundromat, she grew up in Monterey Park, a new immigrant community outside Los Angeles that experienced a wave of backlash against its new Chinese residents, and later in Cerritos, a diverse and fast-growing L.A. suburb. Like Perkins, her political awareness was raised in college. At Stanford, she became an activist on racial-justice and immigrant rights issues. She spent the summer after her sophomore year working with Peace Corps volunteers in Belize, helping create lending libraries in poor towns.
Only one year after her 1994 graduation from Harvard Law School, Su, a $32,500 attorney for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (now Asian Americans Advancing Justice), a bare-bones nonprofit group in Los Angeles, filed a landmark federal lawsuit on behalf of 72 Thai women and men who had been kept, essentially, as slaves in a sweatshop in El Monte, an L.A. suburb, where they were made to work 18 hours a day.
Su and a group of young activists from the Thai Community Development Center, Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), and Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) learned that the workers, who had been smuggled into the country by a Thai crime syndicate, were living and working in a two-story apartment building with boarded-up windows surrounded by a barbed-wire fence patrolled by armed guards. The Thai employers had promised them good jobs and a better life, but they toiled from 7 a.m. to midnight sewing clothes for major brands, such as Anchor Blue, B.U.M., High Sierra, and Clio. Their pay, however, turned out to be less than $2 an hour. Their captors even deducted the alleged cost of their transportation to the United States—about $5,000 per worker—from their paychecks and required them to purchase basic necessities from a company store at marked-up prices. The bosses warned them that if they tried to escape, they and their families back in Thailand would be physically harmed.
But one worker did escape, and eventually word of the slave compound reached federal, state, and local authorities, who launched a pre-dawn raid on August 2, 1995. After the raid, however, the frightened workers were sent to the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center in downtown Los Angeles, where they were again held captive, this time by the federal government. There, they were forced to wear orange prison uniforms.
Su brought a suit that held the brand-name garment manufacturers and retailers liable for using slave labor to manufacture their clothing.
Su represented the workers and won their release from federal detention after nine days. Meeting with them seven days a week, helping them find new housing, making doctor’s appointments for them, taking them to Griffith Park, and getting them donated tickets to Disneyland, Su gained their trust and encouraged them to tell their stories to the media and in court.
“I looked at the workers—so many of them women about my age—and I knew the only difference between me and them came from the pure chance of having been born in a different place with different opportunities,” Su told Harvard Law School’s magazine.
Working with a team of lawyers from public-interest groups and private law firms, Su brought a suit that held the brand-name garment manufacturers and retailers liable for using slave labor to manufacture their clothing. It resulted in more than $4 million in restitution for the workers, including settlements from Mervyn’s, Montgomery Ward, and a host of other chains and clothing companies.
The El Monte sweatshop owners had also used a sewing shop in downtown Los Angeles, staffed by Latino workers, as a front. Su brought the Latino workers into the case and organized meetings to build solidarity between the Thai and Latino workers.
Seven of the compound’s operators pled guilty to criminal counts of involuntary servitude and conspiracy. Su got the federal government to grant the workers legal immigration status, arguing that federal laws written to protect narcotics informants should also apply to undocumented workers who expose the criminal behavior of their employers.
The El Monte scandal made headlines around the world. It helped trigger a nationwide anti-sweatshop movement propelled by unions, college students, and immigrant rights groups. The Clinton administration embraced the cause, resulting in a groundbreaking anti-trafficking law that established a new visa (the T visa) to allow victims to remain in the U.S.—a direct result of Su’s advocacy to protect the Thai workers from deportation. The movement has since pressured major global apparel companies and such retailers as Nike and Walmart to adopt codes of conduct for the employers in other countries whose products they market, regarding pay, safety conditions, and sexual abuse at work. These codes have required those employers to allow human rights groups to monitor work conditions and to abide by their own codes.
The El Monte case also led Su to help draft and lobby for a statewide law, passed in 1999, that made garment manufacturers guarantors of the wages and overtime pay of their subcontractors’ workers.
Nick Ut/AP Photo
Former garment workers who were forced to work in a sweatshop gather for a news conference, August 2, 2005, to mark the ten-year anniversary since 72 Thai nationals were liberated from virtual slavery in El Monte, California.
Finding her way as a lawyer and activist, Su, who is fluent in Spanish and Mandarin, became adept at combining legal advocacy, community and worker organizing, policy change, and multiracial coalition-building. In 2001, she won a MacArthur Foundation grant—often called the “genius” award—for her innovative work as a workers’ rights and civil rights advocate.
“At Harvard, we were taught to think like lawyers, but we did not learn to think like human beings,” Su often says.
In April 2011, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed Su to the post of California’s labor commissioner, the position that enforces the state’s labor laws. There, she brought her political and legal skills to help vulnerable workers, particularly those who suffer from the most prevalent current version of wage theft when their employers deliberately mislabel them as “independent contractors,” who do not fall under the jurisdiction of minimum-wage laws and to whom employers offer no benefits.
Su launched a “Wage Theft Is a Crime” campaign that helped restaurant, car wash, and garment workers get paid by employers who had cheated them out of wages. She brought lawsuits on behalf of truck drivers at the Los Angeles port, whose employers had misclassified them as independent contractors rather than employees. The lawsuits compelled the companies to pay thousands of dollars to the drivers. She built partnerships with unions, immigrant rights groups, and community organizations to monitor workplaces and enforce minimum-wage and other rules, focusing on particular industries where wage theft was endemic, much as David Weil did during his tenure heading the Wage and Hour Division in Barack Obama’s Labor Department.
Ironically, many California corporate leaders viewed Su’s approach as pro-business because it punished rogue employers who violated the state’s labor and minimum-wage laws and whose lawbreaking enabled them to produce goods and services more cheaply than employers who followed the law.
In 2019, California’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, appointed Su to his Cabinet as labor secretary, a position from which she’s helped protect workers from many on-the-job dangers caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. California is one of a handful of states that adopted its own emergency measures identifying enforceable steps employers must take to protect workers from the virus.
After the passage of the landmark Assembly Bill 5, a 2019 law that gave employees misclassified by companies as independent contractors such protections as the minimum wage, overtime, workers’ compensation, and unemployment and disability insurance, Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower, whose office falls under Su’s purview, filed lawsuits against Uber and Lyft for wage theft. This November, the two companies and other rideshare firms spent $200 million to win a state ballot measure that carved them out of AB-5, but the law still applies to millions of other workers.
Su has encouraged employers and unions to work together to plan for future jobs and ensure training to meet the needs of targeted industries—an idea she pioneered at L.A.’s port, where jobs for dockworkers are being phased out by automation. That experience led Newsom to appoint Su, along with his chief economic and education advisers, to lead a Future of Work Commission in May 2019.
“At Harvard, we were taught to think like lawyers, but we did not learn to think like human beings,” Su often says.
Although California’s business community has often been at odds with Su’s pro-worker allegiances, she has won plaudits from business leaders for her “professionalism” and open door. “Julie Su has always been open to the views of employers and is willing to listen to the concerns of the business community,” said Allan Zaremberg, president and CEO of the California Chamber of Commerce, in a recent statement.
The labor movement appears to be split over its support for the next labor secretary. Some back Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who once headed the Boston Building and Construction Trades Council, though he has announced his intention to run for a third term as mayor. Other union leaders have embraced Rep. Andy Levin, a Democratic congressman from Michigan with a background as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—though in the face of a House Democratic majority that has dwindled to the point that the number of Democrats may exceed the number of Republicans by fewer than five, it’s unlikely Biden will appoint any more House members to Cabinet posts. Some labor leaders have recently surfaced the name of Patrick Gaspard, a onetime official with SEIU Local 1199 (which represents health care workers in New York and other East Coast cities) and political director in Obama’s White House before being appointed as his ambassador to South Africa from 2013 to 2016. Gaspard, an African American, most recently served for three years as president of the Open Society Foundations, funded by philanthropist George Soros.
Su, however, has powerful and enthusiastic backers from within the labor movement, and from progressive elected officials, immigrant rights and community organizers, and Asian American activists. In an interview with the Prospect, Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA), who chairs the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, praised Su as being “ready on day one to bring her talent and experience to Washington, so that all workers in this country can lead better lives.”
Whoever gets the job will replace Trump appointee Eugene Scalia, whom The New Yorker has called “a wrecking ball aimed at workers.” Under Scalia, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has even declined to set enforceable rules for workplace safety in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
If Biden picks Su, she could restore the agency’s mission to what it was under FDR’s labor secretary.
“I have come to the conclusion,” said Frances Perkins, “that the Department of Labor should be the Department for Labor, and that we should render service to working people.” That’s the kind of Labor Department that Julie Su would run.
