Take my Mayor, Please!
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh has been rumored to be seeking a job in the Biden administration since well before Biden was the presumptive nominee.
I, for one, dearly hope that he does get a job in a Biden administration. I know I’m not alone in this. Walsh has been an absolute disaster of a mayor.
It’s tempting to go through a litany of Walsh’s failures as mayor — the failed Olympic bid, the failed Formula One race, the continual defunding of public education, the inaction on affordable housing, climate change, police reform, and transportation — but they all boil down to this: Walsh runs Boston as a suburbanite would.
So Walsh’s Boston is a place for suburbanites to work and play and even live in luxury housing for a few years while making six figures at Fidelity until they can afford a house in Lexington. And those of us who have chosen to make this city our lifelong home do not matter at all: we are, fundamentally, an annoyance.
It’s not surprising, then, that suburbanites pour millions of dollars into the mayor’s campaign accounts, or that the suburbanites who run the local media love our mayor.
The media’s love of Walsh also has to do with white supremacy, of course. White suburbanites love the idea of Boston as a fundamentally Irish-American city with an Irish-American mayor with that accent at the helm. Of course, most of Boston’s Irish-American population decamped to the suburbs rather than send their kids to school with Black people, but no matter: the romantic (to white people) image of white Irish Boston has a lot of power.
With all the money and media support Walsh has, he’ll be tough to beat as mayor. I expect New Mexico-based Boston politics reporter David Bernstein has already pronounced him the winner of next fall’s election.
So I’m thrilled at the idea of Joe Biden taking him off our hands. Two smart, competent women have already announced for mayor, and the city would be in better hands with either of them than it is currently. Make him ambassador to Ireland, or Ambassador to the Vatican,which is how we got rid of our last awful Irish-American mayor.
Just don’t make him Secretary of Labor.
Apparently a number of unions are supporting his appointment to this position, which is absolutely baffling. Sure, he’s the former head of the Boston Building Trades, and he has, as mayor, pushed hard to make sure that members of the building trades unions have steady employment working on high-end buildings that wind up half occupied. Even now he’s pushing a big development in Dorchester’s Columbia Point, yet another area of Boston (in addition to the Seaport, which is really Menino’s baby) that won’t survive a rise in sea levels. He also had staff members who pressured the Boston Calling music festival into using union stagehands.
But while he’s done well by some unions, he’s done horribly by others. These unions have something in common: they all represent a large number of workers who identify as female. When Tufts Medical Center nurses went on strike, he didn’t support them, but, rather, scolded them on the importance of doing marathon negotiating sessions. He did not support striking Marriott workers (nor did the New York Yankees, the Edmonton Oilers, and Common, all of whom crossed picket lines to get into the Ritz Carlton). And he has shown nothing but contempt for Boston’s unionized teachers.
Most recently, the school committee (appointed by the mayor) tried to force Boston’s teachers back into school buildings after the rate of positive Covid-19 tests citywide triggered remote learning according to the memorandum of understanding the union and the city signed.
Under Walsh’s leadership, the City of Boston has shown a complete disregard for good-faith negotiation. This alone is disqualifying for a Secretary of Labor position.
There are people who want a management-friendly Secretary of Labor whose record shows a clear pattern of misogyny. Those people are Republicans.
Democratic voters have a right to expect more.
