Interview with Julie Su (Assistant Secretary, then Acting Secretary of Labor under Joe Biden)
Julie Su was the Acting Secretary for Labor under President Biden between 2023-2025. Prior to serving in the Cabinet, she served as the Deputy Secretary of Labor, and before that as the California Labor Secretary under Governor Gavin Newsom between 2019-2021.
Interview conducted 13th March, 2025
Q: How would you characterise Bidenomics? What do you think its objectives were, and how do you think it performed over the four years?
Let me first say, I don’t think that we had enough time to truly evaluate what the impact would have been, and that’s unfortunate because what we did see was pretty significant shifts fundamentally in some of the primary goals that we had—good job creation, equity, economic growth.
Just to answer that one off the top, I think it’s too convenient for some people who disagreed with the policies to cite where it ended as the end. It was far from the end. We all said, and it was very true, that we had a lot more work to do. What we were trying to do was going to take more time than four years, and we knew that.
I would say that rather than one single policy, Bidenomics was fundamentally about reimagining what was possible in our economy. It was a rejection not just of the more conservative idea of government staying out of things, but also of the neoliberal idea that government should take a back seat. Fundamentally, it rejected trickle-down economics. The idea was to build a “high road” to the middle class while also combating the “low road”, and you needed to do both of those things in tandem.
One other important aspect was strong unions. Building the “high road” meant recognising that we didn’t just need jobs, but good jobs. We weren’t agnostic about the quality of jobs created and that meant supporting unions and union power.
What does that look like in practice?
First, a President that clearly and unapologetically embraced the benefits of unions, not just to their members but to the economy and the country as a whole. “Wall Street didn’t build America, the middle class built America, and unions built the middle class” is something President Biden not only said over and over, but something he believed deeply and that was fundamental to our vision.
Second, the tighter the labour market, the more worker power we built – which was good for the economy. Workers had choices. The “great resignation,” where workers left jobs for better jobs, and other phenomena reflected this. A tight labour market also strengthens unions’ ability to organise and bargain for better contracts. One way to achieve this was through historic federal investments that resulted in job growth that far exceeded expectations.
Third, we believed in collective bargaining and showed that through our actions. As President Biden’s Labor Secretary, I showed up at the bargaining table time and time again to help ensure a fair contract that valued the workers—and I made it clear only the workers themselves could decide whether a contract was fair. We didn’t interfere in ways past administrations did, nor did we curtail union power. We helped workers achieve historic contracts that lifted up not only union members but also the sectors, industries, and regions they were in.
And fourth, we leveraged federal dollars to build strong American industries that create good jobs and support communities, particularly lower and middle-income Americans. This was the concept of building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.
Implementing the signature legislation of Bidenomics—infrastructure, clean energy, manufacturing, and CHIPS and science—was about not just getting the money out, but attaching standards to ensure those who had been left behind benefited. We implemented project labour agreements in construction and community benefits agreements in loans and grants to make sure investments actually reached those who needed them. This was a generational investment in industrial policy, building up industries that would be the drivers of good jobs. Whether due to policies of the last 40 years that devastated those industries or because of underinvestment, we aimed to address both.
Bidenomics rejected false choices, such as having either strong industry or good jobs, or combating the climate crisis at the expense of good jobs.
Once we had those good jobs, who got them mattered. Without being intentional, the same people who have been left out before would be left out again. We rebuilt physical infrastructure while also building other kinds of infrastructure — the roads and bridges that connect people to good jobs and employers to the people they need. I called these roads and bridges our nation’s “opportunity infrastructure.” Local hiring was a key part of this effort — making sure people who lived in the places where investments were going had onramps to the jobs.
There is a deep racial divide that we refused to ignore. Black workers in this country live in states with the weakest labour protections. Every Confederate state is a so-called right-to-work state, where unions are weakened and almost all of these same states have no minimum wage or a minimum wage set below the federal minimum wage. Addressing this divide was intentional and hands-on, and often involved working directly with mayors to build opportunity infrastructure in their cities.
And finally, combating the “low road” economy was equally important. If you constantly have a “low road” economy, it pulls the “high road” down. This meant we enforced labour laws, collecting over a billion dollars for workers whose wages were stolen, and addressing unsafe working conditions. For instance, we had 13-year-olds working on the kill floor of meatpacking plants. This is a “low road” practice that fuels a “low road” economy if it’s not addressed.
Bidenomics was not a single policy but a combination of all of these—embracing strong unions, creating good jobs, promoting industrial policy that led to equitable outcomes, using historic federal investments to drive these goals, and intentionally measuring success by the impact on marginalised communities, communities of colour, and exploited workers.
Q: Would you say that the Biden administration had a fully developed agenda from the start, but failed (for political reasons) to deliver on aspects like the care economy and labour relations? Or that it did broadly meet its goals? Or that there was no single pre-designed programme, and ‘Bidenomics’ was largely improvised?
I think there’s truth in all of those. I often think about what could have been if the full agenda of Bidenomics had been passed at the outset (in 2021) and what we could have delivered. There’s this whole question we were confronted with throughout the administration of why people didn’t feel it, if our policies were working — they would have felt much more if the entire agenda from the beginning had passed, from the expanded child tax credit to the care economy to addressing significant barriers to union organising.
But I also think it’s very important not to bemoan what did not happen, but to utilise the full powers of what you are given when you have them. And we tried to pursue elements of our overall agenda in other ways, though without the investments that needed Congressional approval, we were obviously unable to give those aspects of the agenda the resources required. But we focused on expanding access to care and improving care jobs through infrastructure and manufacturing, which did pass, and we used other funds, including funds that were not part of the bills, like Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) money, which we used to build the opportunity infrastructure—not a bunch of disconnected training programs for skills that might be needed for jobs that might materialise, but an interconnected system where training ended in good jobs and included support for things like childcare and transportation, the absence of which have been significant barriers to employment. In other words, the full story of what we did is not just told through the bills President Biden signed but also the ways we used existing powers and resources to fundamentally reshape the economy by putting workers first. We used every lever we had to build up this infrastructure, recognising that roads and bridges to opportunity, roads and bridges out of poverty, are as important as physical roads and bridges, and they require the same level of coordination, planning, and bringing people to the table who have been excluded. This included make sure people were getting pathways into registered apprenticeship programs, given uniforms and tools — things that concretely give people the ability to transform their lives. We used that power. We improvised where we had to and learned along the way, including about how to best partner with state and local leaders. To build this workforce opportunity infrastructure, we created a Good Jobs Alliance of cities with visionary mayors who understood that jobs had to be good jobs and access to them had to be real for all communities.
And then, I think this is where the “we didn’t have enough time” comes in. Some people still say the early investments, especially the American Rescue Plan, were too big and caused some of the economic problems, like high prices, that we had a hard time moving past. But the other realities of Bidenomics were that real wages did go up, especially for lower and middle-income individuals.
People’s sense of security and affordability is twofold: the price of things and what people make. The numbers don’t lie — wages outpaced inflation. But it wasn’t enough to overcome the COVID hangover. People felt like the bottom could drop out again at any moment. Plus, working people have been falling behind for 50 years. Getting their wages up a little now wasn’t enough. A truly good job and a secure life are about more than just paying rent; it’s about being able to go to the doctor without breaking the bank, retiring with dignity, coming home with energy to play with your kids, taking weekends off, and having paid vacation. We don’t have enough of those things.
But the policies and investments — the idea of building the “high road” while combating the “low road” — moved the needle significantly. Wages increased, racial inequities shrank, the Black-white unemployment gap was the smallest it’s been, and women were in the labour force in record numbers. We kept breaking our own record on these measures. Equity does matter, and inequity constrains growth. We saw proof of both.
Q: How important was the overall hot economy to support working power, compared to proactive policies (from the Labor Department or through conditionality on economic programmes in the Inflation Reduction Act)?
Very good question. I believe the proactive policies of this administration were critical to the overall hot economy—we see this from a comparison of our recovery with that of other countries from the devastating impact of COVID—but I’ll add a third factor. You mentioned the hot economy pulling workers up, but I’d also say we were lifting the floor—raising the bottom. We called for increasing the minimum wage, something that requires Congressional action, but we also lifted the floor with the powers we had, including the first update to prevailing wage regulations (that benefit construction workers) in 40 years and an Executive Order requiring a $15 minimum wage for federal contractors.
Another way of raising the floor is through the union piece. While unions represent barely 11% of the entire workforce and are much smaller in certain industries, we used that lever. We supported unions, and they capitalised on it.
Unions are more popular than they’ve been in decades, and the contracts negotiated, including the dozen or so I was at the table for, are historic. The UAW secured a minimum 25% wage increase with much higher increases for the lowest paid workers.
These increases led to a UAW bump in non-unionised auto manufacturing too. We saw similar progress in the healthcare industry, for flight attendants, and for longshoremen who secured a 32% wage increase on the West Coast and 62% on the East and Gulf Coasts.
President Biden’s consistent support for workers, like his message to Amazon warehouse workers that the right to unionise is theirs alone, made a big difference. What leaders in power say matters.
Bidenomics wasn’t just one thing. It was the National Labor Relations Board interpreting and enforcing laws with the strongest General Counsel the NLRB has ever had, refusing to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act during strikes, and advocating for fair contracts. When people claim we lost the election due to policy rejection, I say we didn’t do too much— rather we didn’t do enough. We were trying to overcome 50 years of anti-worker policies. Trade policy was part of that too, and we had a phenomenal US Trade Representative who made “worker-centred trade” the priority, but we ran up against a trade orthodoxy that has not put workers first for several decades. I do not believe our policies were rejected, I believe the timidity with which we pursued some of them is why they didn’t resonate.
Q: You’ve said that there was too much emphasis on prices and not enough on wages in the media; and that there wasn’t enough focus on economic security, like healthcare and reliable retirement. Were these the constraints on your economic message?
Let me put it this way: “What was Bidenomics trying to accomplish? What worked and what didn’t?” Those are different questions from “what happened in the election?”
On the first point, it’s not just that we couldn’t break through. People’s sense of wellbeing depends on both prices and wages. But real security comes from more than whether people can afford groceries and gas. Working people haven’t had the security they deserve for a long time. We were trying to reverse decades of anti-worker policies, but we needed to do more.
For example, under President Biden, we restored retirement security for millions of union workers whose pensions were about to collapse through the Butch Lewis Act. That was significant, but you shouldn’t have to be in a union to have retirement security. The same goes for healthcare. Our job at the Department of Labor is to crack down on insurance plans who deny coverage for care illegally, including mental health care. But our enforcement authority is limited, and shrinking the federal government’s enforcement capabilities would be damaging. I was always acutely aware that our enforcement work was critical, but for everyone who was illegally denied care that we could help, there were hundreds more for whom health care was too expensive, too confusing, too inaccessible. These are not messaging problems, they are real failures of our policies and politics.
I know you were trying to summarise, but I want to emphasise that we can’t view these policies solely through the lens of the election. That diminishes their importance. It’s not about perfect policies or flawless execution—we didn’t have enough time to do everything. But if we had delivered on all of Bidenomics, we’d be having a very different conversation today.
Q: What would you say is the single biggest policy or innovation that you pursued that helped raise the living standards of low paid service workers (such as cleaners in Las Vegas hotels)?
I would say it was a combination of policies. Initially, the Rescue Plan aimed to put more money in people’s pockets due to the crisis we went through. The idea was to establish a floor when the bottom had fallen out.
Additionally, supporting expansive union organising was crucial. In the case of Las Vegas hotels, there’s a strong union presence that has made those jobs decent jobs with healthcare, job security, workload protections, and a voice in the adoption of technology. I was there when The Venetian, the last hotel on the Strip to unionise, celebrated its first union contract. It was amazing to feel the energy and pride of the workers, mostly immigrants and workers of colour. But it was also the energy and pride of the employer who understood that employees who were heard and respected were vital to a strong, successful business. I have seen this all over the country—that unions are good for workers and for business. Our support for unions was about putting workers first but also about how you support good employment practices and build the strongest economy possible. The right to organise is vital. We often talk about good union jobs in construction, and we definitely focused on that with our investments in roads and bridges, in clean water through replacing lead pipes and high speed reliable internet in all communities, but for service workers like those in hospitality, a union is their best avenue for economic security and the American Dream. The sense of shared prosperity that comes when labour and management sit together at the table to determine their collective future is one of the greatest benefits of a unionised workforce.
At the Department of Labor, we cracked down on union-busting. For example, we enforced a statute requiring employers who hire third parties to monitor or surveil employees during organising efforts to report that activity. We couldn’t prevent it from happening (the practice is legal), but we could require that they be transparent about it. And we made that information public. These seemingly small actions had a tangible impact.
Moreover, although I’ve talked about the fact that the federal minimum wage is still just $7.25 an hour, over half of the states have a higher minimum. And within those states, some sectors have an even higher floor. In California, for instance, fast food workers secured a $20 minimum wage. Not all improvements come from federal policy; state and local policies play a role too. The way we approached that at the Department of Labor was to be clear: workers should receive the highest protections to which they’re entitled. That means our Department should not be the primary enforcer if all we can get workers is $7.25/hour; we should work in partnership with state and local labour enforcement agencies, share information and collaborate so workers get what they earned under the most protective standard. And we should treat wage theft as the crime that it is by working with district attorneys and attorneys general to bring criminal prosecutions in appropriate instances.
In the American South, where manufacturing is growing—and this is not by accident, since the desirability of the South is closely tied to weaker labour laws, hostility to unions, and a more exploitable workforce—we really focused on supporting workers in this part of the country. We focused on leveraging federal dollars to create good jobs and uplift those who have been excluded, including on the basis of race; we stepped up our enforcement, including hiring the first investigators in the Mississippi Delta; and we had Atlanta, Charlotte, and Birmingham in our Good Jobs Alliance. This approach helps lift standards in states that might otherwise resist such efforts.
Q: On industrial policy, where were those ‘high road’ examples of collaboration that other countries could learn from?
I’m glad you asked. One thing I appreciated was the collaboration within the federal government. Because of President Biden’s commitment to workers, every department involved in implementing industrial policy investments had to consider their impact on workers. From the Department of Energy to the Department of Transportation and the EPA, there was collaboration from the top down.
The real impact happens at the local level. We created the Good Jobs Alliance, which included about a dozen cities or regions where federal investments were flowing and where local leadership was eager to collaborate. These regions adopted good job principles, and we worked directly with mayors, community organisations, workforce development boards, and labour unions.
For example, in Charlotte, North Carolina, we worked with the Charlotte Building Trades to make sure they benefited from federal infrastructure investments. We knew unions had to be at the table from the start. Same with employers and contractors who could signal where jobs would be. This way, employers and unions could work together to prepare people from the community in advance. It’s too late to begin training workers once hiring begins,. And we brought in an organisation called “She Built This City” which focused on training Black women in construction trades. Together, they formed the Charlotte Regional Apprenticeship Collaboration which established direct entry for She Built This City graduates to a union apprenticeship. This was a win-win because the unions knew the people coming in would be well-prepared and it opened up opportunities for qualified women into trades jobs. In Atlanta, the same thing happened with an organisation called Georgia Stand-Up: its pre-apprenticeship program became a direct entry program into apprenticeships with the Georgia Building Trades. And the jobs wouldn’t have existed without federal investments, so this is how all the pieces came together: federal dollars creating good union jobs and partnerships on the ground to ensure those jobs were available to communities that have been excluded for far too long.
This effort wasn’t one-size-fits-all. It was driven by local needs, but we brought everyone to the table, ensuring unions played a key role and marginalised communities were included. We now have a playbook of effective strategies, such as cities developing regional equity standards, communities coming together to expand access to care while lifting up care jobs, women-led organisations preparing women for jobs that have been closed off for too long, or unions agreeing to accept apprentices from community-based pre-apprenticeship programs. By working at the local level and rolling up our sleeves, we showed what can happen when the federal government is a collaborator and also a convener who makes sure that everyone has a seat at the table.
Q: Given that the Democrats lost the November 2024 elections, what do you wish you had done differently?
I think that the big picture is, I am certain that it’s not that we went too far in these policies. It’s not that the investments were too big, the standards were too high, or that we were too focused on workers or those who have been systematically excluded. It’s that we didn’t go far enough
.
Could we have put even more standards into funding so that when communities saw projects breaking ground, they knew not just that a new factory was being built, but also what those jobs would look like? I think so. There could have been more clarity about the quality of jobs we wanted and expected.
Of course, I wish we had a Congress that would have made it law. The struggle was to utilise the levers we had as the executive branch, constantly evaluating how much authority we really had. But where we did use it, it made a big difference.
As one specific example, the Department of Labor partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which had funds to transition from gas-powered buses to electric vehicles. As that money was going out, the EPA had school districts who would be buying the buses ask potential suppliers about working conditions for the people building the buses. It wasn’t a requirement, but it sent a message. When the government asks questions about whether workers will be paid well and whether they will have the right to unionise, it shows what we care about. And we saw that influence supplier behaviour.
In Georgia, a school bus manufacturer called Bluebird, with a largely Black workforce of about 1,400 workers, was trying to unionise. The employer didn’t resist that effort, and I believe the federal funds played a role. I worked with them to reach a contract within a year. This contrasts with what we see elsewhere, like at Starbucks, where it’s been years and they haven’t reached a contract, which is often a deliberate effort to undermine workers.
This example shows how different levers fit together. I wish we had been bolder about using all the levers to ensure meaningful outcomes for working families who just want a shot at doing more than just getting by.
Q: What would you say are the lessons from your experience for a country like the UK or a Western European country?
I think the idea of building a “high road” while combating the “low road” has lessons for everyone. There’s a “low road” everywhere. Just setting a minimum floor by law doesn’t mean everyone lives above that floor. Many do not, especially immigrant workers, workers of colour, and vulnerable women.
We need to genuinely enforce and raise that floor. Because when that floor is low, it drags everyone down. This is true for workers everywhere who work full-time, year-round, and still live in poverty; those who work two and even three jobs to make ends meet; those who can’t afford to live near where they work no matter how hard they try. Sometimes the most vulnerable workers are made vulnerable because of policies like immigration. If immigrant workers do not enjoy the protections of labour law, it creates an exploitable pool of workers that makes all workers less safe.
When I was at the bargaining table on behalf of President Biden, and unions were demanding higher wage increases, employers would often say, “This is so far above the market wage, we can’t do it,” or, “The union agreed to this low contract wage before, why should we change it now?” My response was, “Maybe we should question why the market wage or the last contract was so low to begin with. We’re not in that moment anymore.” I think the lesson that we cannot allow the floor to be so low that it brings everyone down is important. And that there is nothing inevitable or natural about the floor being so low. Allowing so much poverty is a policy decision. Failing to reward work is a policy decision. We can make better decisions.
The truth is, the US has much to learn from western European countries when it comes to unions. The US has lacked a commitment to strong unions. The ability of employers to interfere, coerce, and intimidate has driven extreme poverty and inequality. We need to learn from Europe on this. Reiterating the importance of unions and their benefits to the entire economy is always worth restating.
ENDS