6 Members Of Biden's Labor Transition Team To Watch

The team Biden tasked with transitioning the Labor Department will be headed by former Deputy Labor Secretary Chris Lu, who has deep ties to former President Barack Obama.

Lu serves as an adviser to the technology firm FiscalNote and as a fellow at a think tank affiliated with the University of Virginia.

Before Obama became president, Lu worked in the future commander-in-chief's U.S. Senate office as legislative director and then acting chief of staff.

Obama tapped Lu as executive director of the Obama-Biden transition project in 2008, then as assistant to the president and Cabinet secretary from 2009 to 2013. In 2014, Obama nominated Lu to the post of deputy labor secretary as a replacement for the outgoing Seth Harris.

Lu served in that position until 2017, taking a broadly worker-friendly stance, including publicly backing the Obama administration's support for a national paid leave measure.

Lu also helped oversee the finalization of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration record-keeping and reporting rule that required employers to electronically submit information about workplace injuries and illnesses and barred employers from retaliating against workers for reporting such incidents.

Seth Harris served as deputy labor secretary from 2009 to 2014 under Obama and spent part of that time as acting labor secretary.

He is a visiting professor at Cornell University and serves as an adviser and board member for several companies, according to his LinkedIn profile.

During his time in the Obama administration, Harris was involved in implementing several pro-employee measures.

Early in the administration, Harris oversaw the rollout of two DOL proposals — announced by then-Vice President Biden — that sought to provide greater protections for workers with 401(k) and individual retirement accounts, including new restrictions for investment advisers.

Moreover, Harris threw his weight behind a bill sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, that aimed to crack down on businesses that misclassify their employees as independent contractors. Harris also spoke in favor of raising the minimum wage for workers generally, but especially for tipped workers whose mandatory payout from employers has not been increased since 1991.

Additionally, Harris sought to help employers avoid getting on the wrong side of the Labor Department, taking part in the development of a new regulatory and enforcement strategy called Plan/Prevent/Protect that required companies to take steps to find and fix violations before federal investigators arrived on the scene.

Like Lu and Harris, Jen Abruzzo worked in the Obama administration, serving as acting general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Shortly after Peter Robb was confirmed to that position on a permanent basis in 2017, Abruzzo left to join the Communications Workers of America as special counsel for strategic initiatives.

Abruzzo's name came up earlier this year as a Democratic favorite to fill a seat on the NLRB, but Trump has kept the seat open.

During her time on the board's legal team, Abruzzo worked on and oversaw a number of prominent lawsuits.

One of those was a battle against Macy's Inc. in which the Fifth Circuit upheld the NLRB's certification of a unit of cosmetics and fragrance counter workers at one of the retail giant's stores in Massachusetts. Macy's appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices ultimately declined to hear the case.

Abruzzo also represented the labor board in a legal fight against In-N-Out Burger Inc., which ultimately lost its bid to bar employees from putting "Fight for $15" pins on their uniforms.

In addition, Abruzzo defended the board's controversial Purple Communications Inc. ruling allowing workers to use employer email systems for union business, arguing that it facilitates workers' rights under the National Labor Relations Act without imposing on businesses.

Jenny Yang's selection to Biden's transition team adds another Obama administration alumna to the list. During Obama's second term in office and part of Trump's tenure, Yang served as chair, vice chair and commissioner at the EEOC.

Yang, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute think tank, arrived at the EEOC in 2013 following a stint at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, where she was a part of the team that represented female Walmart employees who sued the retail behemoth alleging sex discrimination.

While at the EEOC, Yang took an interest in a variety of issues, including pushing early in her stint as chair for new regulations to shed light on how to offer corporate wellness programs without violating federal anti-discrimination statutes.

Additionally, Yang oversaw an expansion of the commission's pay-data collection efforts, with an eye toward attacking pay discrimination, and she backed an effort to require federal agencies to follow specific, numeric goals for the employment of individuals with disabilities.

However, Yang told Law360 in 2017 that her greatest success at the commission was helping guide an expansion of workplace protections for LGBT people, pointing to a 2015 administrative ruling that held that a claim of discrimination based on an individual's sexual orientation is covered under Title VII's prohibition of sex discrimination.

Patricia Smith also spent time in the Obama government, serving as solicitor of the Labor Department from 2010 to 2017.

Smith came to that post after serving as a commissioner at the New York state Department of Labor. During her time in both state and federal government, she was known for her pro-worker positions, spurring stiff resistance to her solicitor nomination from Senate Republicans.

After stepping down as the Labor Department's top lawyer when Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Smith joined the National Employment Law Project as senior counsel, where she has proven herself a fierce critic of the Trump administration.

In 2018, Smith slammed Trump for floating a plan to merge the departments of Labor and Education, saying it showed a "lack of respect" for the agencies' differences.

Moreover, Smith expressed strong concern about Trump's selection in 2019 of Eugene Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to head the Labor Department. While acknowledging Scalia as a dogged advocate for his clients' interests, she told Law360 last year that trait could prove troubling when the client is Trump.

Lynn Rhinehart never worked in the Obama administration, but the former head lawyer for the AFL-CIO is known as a longtime worker advocate.

Rhinehart is a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, where she landed after leaving the AFL-CIO in 2018 after more than two decades as an attorney for the labor federation. She started there as an associate attorney in 1996 and worked her way up to the general counsel position by 2009.

Rhinehart previously expressed optimism about a string of wins for union supporters at the NLRB under the Obama administration, but she said she still saw room for improvement in efforts to address large-scale threats including right-to-work laws and high court cases. The following year, for instance, she warned that the "chronically underfunded" labor board might cut corners in terms of training and infrastructure.

Recently, Rhinehart came out in support of a sweeping Democratic-backed labor bill that would limit independent-contractor classification, penalize employers for interfering in unionization, roll back right-to-work laws and reverse business-friendly decisions by courts and agencies.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, as it's known, has also gotten public backing from the Biden camp as part of a wide-ranging about-face from Trump labor policies.

--Additional reporting by Vin Gurrieri, Ben James, Aaron Vehling, Andrew Kragie and Braden Campbell. Editing by Aaron Pelc and Jill Coffey.