EMPLOYMENT & IMMIGRATION Pat Pizzella's school days In college, the acting Labor secretary was a conservative bomb-thrower.

Four decades before he became acting Labor secretary, Patrick Pizzella was already siding against labor unions.

In October 1975, Pizzella, an undergraduate at the University of South Carolina majoring in business administration, had strong words about a wave of teacher strikes that gripped Chicago, New York City, Boston, and other major cities, writing in the school newspaper that it was an "unlawful act of kidnapping a child's education and holding it for ransom to be paid by taxpayers."


“To be effective and efficient,” Pizzella wrote, “government must be run by the elected officials, not the power hungry, due[s] collecting, public employee union leaders who threaten the health, safety and general well being of us all by shutting down local governments.”

Pizzella’s columns for The Daily Gamecock, USC's student newspaper, written from 1972 to 1975, demonstrate that his hard-right perspective, which alarms unions and endears him to the pro-management Trump administration, has been with him a long time.

Unions have pointed out that Pizzella consistently voted against them after President Barack Obama placed him in a GOP seat on the Federal Labor Relations Authority, and that earlier Pizzella worked with the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff to lobby against worker protections in the Northern Mariana islands.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will nominate Eugene Scalia, the son of late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It's not clear how quickly the Senate will move on the nomination, which is already stirring opposition from Senate Democrats. Even if he's returned quickly to his former post as deputy Labor secretary, Pizzella could hold a key policymaking role for the remainder of Trump’s term.

The Labor Department declined to discuss whether Pizzella’s views have evolved since he wrote the columns.

Patrick Pizzella’s (center) youthful writings are rife with insults and hyperbolic comparisons. | University of South Carolina yearbook

“Deputy Secretary Patrick Pizzella has a distinguished government background that includes nominations to serve in senior government positions by four different presidents — including two nominations by President Obama — and confirmation by the Senate on three separate occasions,” a spokesperson said in a written statement. “As he prepares to take on the role of Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, he has not spent any time reviewing articles he wrote as an 18-year old nearly 47 years ago. Any attempt to pass off those writings as news is simply ludicrous.”

But unions expressed discomfort with the acting secretary's views as a student.

“All we ask is for basic respect and the freedom to negotiate for a fair return on our work,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in a statement. “Acting Secretary Pizzella’s long record of hostility to working people — apparently dating back to his college journalism days — makes him one of the worst possible choices to help lead the Labor Department.”

“Pizzella’s blatant hostility towards workers organizing and having some vehicle to check and balance corporate power is of a piece with this administration’s track record of talking about the importance of workers on the one hand, while doing all it can to hurt them on the other,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement.

Pizzella’s youthful writings are rife with insults and hyperbolic comparisons.

In a column published days after President Richard Nixon’s re-election in 1972, Pizzella wrote that “wild-eyed liberals” were “GUILTY of hypocrisy, foolhardiness, indecision, and an attempt to attack the principles that have made this nation so outstanding.”

“The hypocrisy continues as [Democratic nominee George] McGovern expresses the opinion that he represents the working-man,” Pizzella wrote. “That's similiar [sic] to Hitler saying he represented the Jewish people in Germany during the 1930's.”

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Pizzella railed against McGovern again in 1975, calling him the “diarrhea of the Democratic party.” In the same column, Pizzella lamented that the Gamecock had made “little mention of the outstanding accomplishments of what ... U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond has done for South Carolina.”

Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on the segregationist Dixiecrat ticket, held the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history — a 24-hour and 18-minute tirade against passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, a comparatively mild piece of legislation later superseded by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Pizzella, in his columns, presented himself as a conservative counterweight to liberal media bias. “If one were to compare the amount of ink given to [the] conservative side of the political fence with that given to the liberals it would be like observing a pimple on the world’s ass.“

“During my three years here,” Pizzella continued, “there has been a constant barrage of left-wing mumbo-jumbo accompanied by political cartoons that were almost always opposed to a conservative argument or endorsing a liberal one.”

Pizzella can be credited, however, for recognizing the imminent rise of Ronald Reagan. In a 1975 column, he urged the former California governor to challenge President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, as Reagan eventually did.

Pizzella hurried his graduation to join Reagan’s 1976 primary campaign, according to a 2001 profile in the New Republic. After Reagan was elected president in 1980, Pizzella bounced from agency to agency, building a network of conservative friends that served as a launch pad for his career in Washington.

“You would just always see him around,” Dan Mitchell, a former policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, told the magazine.