President Joe Biden’s nominee for the nation’s top labor secretary, Julie Su, appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce on Wednesday, June 7, 2023—but only after being threatened with a subpoena for her eleventh-hour attempt to evade the hearing.
Her continued evasiveness was on full display during the hours-long grilling on Capitol Hill, especially when it came to defending California’s disastrous anti-independent contractor law AB-5 (Assembly Bill 5) that she endorsed and enforced during her tenure as California’s labor secretary from 2019 to 2021.
Anyone who watched the hearing would readily conclude that AB 5 is a hot mess that must not become a model for the nation given the extreme lengths that Julie Su, with help from Democrat allies on the committee, tried to distance herself from the law that has cost hundreds of thousands of California freelancers their livelihoods since it was enacted in 2020. When asked if AB 5 is a good law, Su became frazzled and was unable to cough up an answer.
Time and again Su assured the committee that AB 5 and the ABC test would never see the light of day in federal law, an unspoken confirmation that AB 5 is indeed an unmitigated disaster that should never be replicated on a national level.
This must come as a surprise to Su’s colleagues in the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, whose proposed new six-factor rule to restrict independent contracting nationwide is modeled precisely...
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