As his replacement, Trump nominated Eugene Scalia, a former corporate lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. While a BigLaw attorney, Scalia made a living defending corporations from the very department he was chosen to head. He boasted a powerhouse clientele, including Boeing (which he defended against a union lawsuit), Walmart (against a Maryland health care law), and the Chamber of Commerce (against the Securities and Exchange Commission). In his most high-profile case, Scalia represented SeaWorld against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, arguing that the agency did not have the authority to regulate SeaWorld’s killer whale trainers. Though Scalia couldn’t get the courts to agree with his absurd arguments, Trump put him in a position to implement this deregulatory outlook as government policy.
Biden’s approach to the Labor Department has been a complete 180 from the Trump years. Biden’s first labor secretary was Marty Walsh, a former union president and mayor of Boston. Walsh rose from construction worker to union president of Local 223 in Boston and general agent of the Boston Building Trades Council. In these capacities, Walsh represented 35,000 workers across different industries, where he negotiated pay raises and won deals with contractors to hire exclusively union workers.
Walsh left the Labor Department in March 2023 to head the NHL Players’ Association, leaving his Deputy Labor Secretary Julie Su as acting head of the department. Su previously worked in California’s state government as labor commissioner under Governor Jerry Brown and secretary of labor under Gavin Newsom. Prior to advocating on behalf of workers in government, Su was an attorney at the Asian-Pacific American Legal Center, where she famously represented Thai garment workers who were trafficked into slavery to work at sweatshops in El Monte.