If President
Joe Biden
wants to help middle-class working parents, he’s nominated the worst person in America as labor secretary. If he instead wants to discourage parenthood and thus exacerbate our disastrous baby bust, Julie Su is the perfect woman for the job.
Biden describes Su as “the American dream” because she is an incredibly successful child of immigrants. But Su’s record is one of regulating the American dream to put it out of reach for millions of women and men.
Su is the architect of AB-5, a disastrous
California
law that effectively outlawed all sorts of flexible contract work. Flexible part-time jobs are exactly what parents need, and so Su’s regulatory agenda harms working families and makes many adults decide that family is out of reach.
What families generally want is for one or both parents to be able to cut back on work to care for their young children. Half of American mothers
said
their preferred child care arrangement is that both parents work flexible hours and share child care (37%), or one parent stays home part time (12%). If mothers could snap their fingers and have the work arrangement they wanted, the net result would be massive flows into part-time work — both from those mothers currently working full time and those currently not working for pay at all.
The family demands more, not less, flexible work arrangements.
What’s more, equality demands more availability of part-time work. Claudia Goldin, the leading feminist labor economist,
argued
that the pay gap between men and women is entirely attributable to the fact that women demand more flexibility and are more likely to prefer working on their schedule.
Su’s magnum opus, AB-5, effectively
outlaws
part-time contract work in many fields in California. It basically says “full time or nothing at all” to a lot of workers who would rather not be 40-hour-a-week wage slaves.
As our editorial described it Friday
, AB-5 “is a special interest law with which Democrats hoped to revive the fortunes of the state’s dying labor unions. Independent contractors forced back into the traditional employee roles that most of them left on purpose could then be forced to join unions as a condition of having work as truckers in closed shops.”
You can see why a partisan Democrat would push such a bill. Biden, however, has said that he wants pro-family reforms. The biggest pro-family reform Biden could advance would be to make it easier for people to work part time and to work as contractors.
Su is not the woman for that job.
