Labor Secretary Tom Perez is using his position to try to build union support for Hillary Clinton. The Cabinet official has been doing campaign stops on her behalf, speaking to labor groups.
Perez met with two members of unions, Unite Here and the Service Employees International Union, in Las Vegas on Dec. 7.
“I’m proud as hell to endorse Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States,” Perez told SEIU members, according a YouTube clip the union posted. “What gets her up in the morning is all of the issues that you fight for every day.”
It is unusual for sitting Cabinet members to campaign for a presidential candidate, but it is not unprecedented. Kathleen Sebelius, then the Health and Human Services secretary, was found in 2012 to have violated the Hatch Act when she campaigned for Obama at a taxpayer-funded event in North Carolina that year. The law that prohibits executive branch employees from engaging in political activity while on duty or in the federal workplace.
It is unlikely that Perez violated the act even though he was speaking to labor organizations, which are directly affected by his agency’s actions, because his appearances, unlike Sebelius’, do not appear to have involved taxpayer-funded events.
“Cabinet secretaries have much more leeway. The law is really about the use of taxpayer resources more than anything,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
“Per the Hatch Act, the secretary’s travel was paid for by the [Clinton] campaign. I would direct the other questions to the campaign,” said Labor Department spokeswoman Mattie Zazueta.
The department declined to answer whether Perez would be doing further campaigning for Clinton.
Matt Patterson, executive director of the Center for Worker Freedom, a nonprofit affiliated with the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, said the incident showed the Obama administration was in cahoots with organized labor.
“At the very least Perez — by urging union members to support Hillary Clinton for president — has abandoned any pretense that his Labor Department is interested in a nonpartisan adjudication of federal labor law. His goal is to increase the power of union bosses, who pick the pockets of workers to fund left-wing causes and candidacies,” Patterson said.
