This year, Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for secretary of labor, became a resident fellow with Harvard’s Kennedy School, Institute of Politics. The Century Foundation also brought Su on board as a full-time senior fellow. These prestigious institutions seem to have overlooked key events in Su’s long career.
Harvard, where Su, a Stanford grad, earned her law degree, hails the Biden nominee as “a nationally recognized workers’ rights and civil rights expert.” As California’s labor commissioner, Su was “widely credited with a renaissance in enforcement and creative approaches to combating wage theft and protecting immigrant workers.” In reality, her experience was a bit more extensive.
Julie Su headed the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA), which oversees the state Employment Development Department (EDD). On Su’s watch during the pandemic, EDD became a major target for fraud. Fraudsters from across the nation, including convicts, filed thousands of fake claims. In the video EDD, rapper Nuke Bizzle bragged, “I done got rich off EDD,” which he bilked for more than $1 million.
All told, the fraud came to more than $30 billion, approximately the gross national product (GNP) of Iceland or Senegal. “California did not have sufficient security measures in place to prevent this level of fraud,” claimed Julie Su, who failed to note what measures the Harvard Law grad had failed to implement.
A Harvard law degree did not make Julie Su more vigilant against fraud or more willing to take accountability.
“The privilege of a Harvard education is unique because so many people in the world will never have it,” Su told the Harvard Political Review. “Once you have it, it’s important to make it count for something beyond one’s self-advancement.” A Harvard law degree did not make Julie Su more vigilant against fraud or more willing to take accountability.
The massive EDD fraud did not come up in the interview or in the profile of Su by the Century Foundation, which calls Su a “renowned labor rights expert and advocate.” That raises another issue that the foundation and Harvard both ignore.
As California’s Labor Commissioner, Su supported Assembly Bill 5, an assault on independent workers from rideshare and truck drivers all the way to freelance writers, editors, and musicians. In effect, the law punishes workers who want to be their own boss, set their own hours, take risks, and so forth.
Asked if AB-5 was a good law, Su responded, “I don’t know what you mean.” For all but the willfully blind, she does. The privileged Harvard Law alum equates “workers” with union members when, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), a full 90.1 percent of American workers, the vast majority, are not union members.
Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Century Foundation make no mention of Su’s support for AB-5, perhaps the most anti-worker law in California or national history. On the other hand, Harvard and the foundation do note that Julie Su was “acting” secretary of labor, without explaining the reasons.
By the standard of her disastrous performance in California, Julie Su was hardly the best-qualified person for the federal labor post. The U.S. Senate never confirmed the Biden pick as labor secretary, but the federal bureaucracy came to her rescue.
According to a Sept. 21, 2023, ruling by Edda Emmanuelli Perez, general counsel of the ironically named Government Accountability Office, Julie Su could continue serving as acting secretary until a successor was appointed, and under Joe Biden, none was.
A GAO bureaucrat thus overrode the Constitution, allowing an anti-worker ideologue to remain in a powerful post. Congress must prevent this from ever happening again, and in the meantime, Julie Su’s career clears up a few realities.
Degrees from Stanford and Harvard Law School are no guarantee of ethical conduct or professional competence. As Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Century Foundation confirm, government is not the only place where incompetence is rewarded and accountability has little value.
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Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.