Yahoo Finance Two pieces of unfinished business remain for outgoing Labor Secretary Walsh
What 26 conversations with the Labor Secretary over the last two years tell us about the recent history of the labor market.
During his two years as Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh was one of the Biden administration’s most reliable economic commentators, appearing from the Labor Department, from the White House, from Davos, and even from COVID quarantine.
Friday is his last day heading up the agency with a departure timed to coincide with the release of the February jobs report. He is set to leave after making important progress but with plenty of remaining “work to do" — as Walsh himself often says — on two key labor fronts.
After 26 Yahoo Finance appearances in recent years, Walsh is set to join for one last conversation on Friday morning before he becomes the executive director of the NHL Players’ Association.
Here's what has come up again and again over the hours of back and forth.
An up and down story on leisure and hospitality
The leisure and hospitality sector — which includes a wide swath of workers from performing artists to hotel clerks to restaurant waiters — came up dozens of times during the Secretary's appearances as the ever-evolving COVID-19 pandemic impacted how Americans socialized and traveled.
Early on, Walsh's tone was one of optimism as the vaccines began to roll out.
“What was hopeful to me today was the hospitality and restaurant numbers,” he said on June 4, 2021, adding “people are going back into those areas.”
But an abrupt change came later that year after successive coronavirus variant waves.
“That number is not where we want it to be,” Walsh said six months later on Dec. 3, 2021, when the sector was about 1.5 million payrolls short of where it had been prior to the pandemic.
In the 15 months since, the situation has improved, but the sector still remains around a half-million jobs short of its pre-pandemic level and is a glaring contrast to the overall jobs market, which reached an unemployment rate of 3.4% in January, the lowest since 1969.
“That's a sector that hasn't come back fully,” Walsh acknowledged in a December appearance. He also discussed his push for more government involvement in the years ahead around workforce development and job training “because a lot of people that might have left an industry during COVID don't want to go back.”
‘We have to be a lot more intentional when it comes to Black Americans’
Another top priority from the day Walsh took office was a focus on the Black unemployment rate as a key economic measure.
From day one, Biden’s economic team has tried to direct attention toward more detailed benchmarks of the labor market such as the Black and Latino rates as well as rates by gender.
Walsh brought up the Black unemployment rate in his first answer during his first Yahoo Finance appearance on April 2, 2021, which came less than two weeks after he was confirmed by the Senate.
“The unemployment rate in the Black communities is over 9.6%, so we still have a lot of work to do here and it's something that we look forward to," he said then.
Two years since, there has been undeniable progress with that rate dropping to 5.4% in January's print. For Biden's team, that is achingly close to the record low of 5.3% that was achieved under then-President Trump in August 2019.
The 5.4% rate is “the second-lowest ever recorded since the '70s, when we started recording those numbers,” Walsh noted in his most recent appearance in February.
Another area where the Administration seems to have made some progress is on the ratio between Black and white unemployment. The administration wants to shrink the gap between the two rates — too often the Black unemployment rate for Blacks is twice the rate of their white counterparts.
Over the last two years, the Biden administration has put forth a concerted effort to use bills like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and others as levers to push for more equity in the labor market in addition to forwarding broader economic development goals.
The ratio was holding just before the pandemic hit in February 2020 with the Black unemployment rate standing at 6.0% compared with 3.0% among white Americans. The most recent reading in January 2023 finds the white unemployment rate at 3.1% and the Black rate at 5.4%.
“We have to be a lot more intentional when it comes to Black Americans,” Walsh said during a 2022 interview for Yahoo Finance's Influencers, noting that the unemployment rate for Black Americans remains stubbornly high compared to other groups.
“If you dive even deeper in some of the jobs that Black Americans have, they're not high-paying jobs, so we have to create better pathways,” he added.
His likely successor appears ready to take on that mantle. When President Biden announced Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su as his pick to replace Walsh, she first thanked the president and Walsh and then added: “To all workers who are toiling in the shadows, to workers who are organizing for power and respect in the workplace, know that we see you, we stand with you, and we will fight for you.”
An area of success: Manufacturing
Another area of constant refrain from Walsh was around manufacturing. Both the overall jobs market (by about a million jobs) and the manufacturing sector (by about 200,000 jobs) have blown past pre-pandemic levels.
“The president has made such a big emphasis on made in America, manufacturing in America,” Walsh noted back on Sept. 3, 2021.
The mentions of manufacturing have only increased as the administration has help shepherd bill after bill though Congress focused on spurring that part of the economy.
“The president worked with Congress on lots of legislation, whether it's the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPs bill where we're going to see a lot of manufacturing, a lot of construction, a lot of building, a lot of opportunity for growth,” Walsh said this January.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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