Julie Su is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, where she works on a range of issues focused on protecting labor rights, growing worker power, and advancing equity in the economy. Su served as acting U.S. secretary of labor from March 2023 to January 2025 and led efforts to fulfill President Biden’s promise to be the most pro-worker pro-union president the country had ever had. Su was instrumental in overseeing a renaissance in enforcement, combating wage theft, child labor, and health and safety violations, particularly for the nation’s most vulnerable workers; prioritizing good jobs for all; strengthening the safety net for workers during times of crisis; and helping to negotiate an unprecedented number of high-stakes collective bargaining agreements that recognized the true value workers bring. Prior to that, she served as the deputy secretary of labor from 2021 to 2023, where she was the chief operating officer of the U.S. Department of Labor.
Su started her career as a civil rights and workers’ rights attorney in Los Angeles at an organization now called Asian Americans Advancing Justice where she pioneered a multipronged strategy that combined litigation using novel legal theories with multiracial worker organizing, policy advocacy, and public campaigns to combat sweatshop conditions, call for corporate accountability, and build capacity for worker organizing. Su’s advocacy led to stronger laws both at the state and federal levels to protect workers, to establish visas for survivors of human trafficking and workplace abuse who come forward in spite of threats of retaliation, and to enhance enforcement powers to make laws meaningful and real.
After nearly two decades as an advocate, Su entered government as the California labor commissioner, where she spent eight years leading a transformative era of wage and hour enforcement, and then as California labor secretary. Su received a MacArthur “Genius” Award. She is the daughter of immigrants, speaks Mandarin and Spanish, and has two adult children with whom she loves to travel, have game nights, and accompany on the piano while they sing.