The Senate confirmed Keith Sonderling to lead the Department of Labor on Wednesday, officially installing the nominee who has been leading in an acting capacity since Lori Chavez-DeRemer's exit in April.
Page F4From§Eachthe milkman edition — 1 October 2026
Senate finally staffs Labor the week it has nothing to do with Kroger's shirts or Walmart's Canadian contract.
As it ran on the front
The Senate seated Keith Sonderling as labor secretary on Wednesday, closing a vacancy that had run on acting status since April, when Lori Chavez-DeRemer left. Six months, one confirmation vote, and the chair at the Department of Labor is full again the same week the two biggest labor stories in the country happened without it.
Start with the bigger number. Kroger told its roughly 400,000 in-store workers they are now required to wear company-issued shirts — the chain's first change to its dress policy in a decade. Nobody at the Labor Department needed to approve that, hon. A dress code is not a wage and not an hour; it is a line item on the company's own ledger, and the company wrote it alone.…
…(cont) Now the smaller workforce with the bigger outcome. In Mississauga, Ontario, eight hundred Walmart warehouse workers ratified a two-year contract — the first union agreement a Walmart has signed anywhere in North America. Unifor Local 252 opened that organizing drive in September 2024; it closed this summer, and the paperwork landed September 23, eight days before the Senate vote. That contract required nothing from Washington either. It is a Canadian local, bargaining under a Canadian labor board, signing on Canadian soil.
Lay the two numbers side by side and the gap has a size: roughly five hundred Kroger workers received a new shirt for every one Walmart worker who received a union contract, and neither column ran through Sonderling's desk. The department spent half a year empty and reopened fully staffed into a week where the only two labor stories on the wire belonged, respectively, to a corporate memo and a foreign labor board.
That is not bad timing. That is where the authority already sits: with the employer who sets the dress code by fiat, and with whichever country still has a labor board willing to certify a union. The Senate did not confirm a referee for either event, because neither event asked the United States for one. It confirmed a vacancy filled on schedule, arriving the same week its own jurisdiction had nothing in it worth filing.
“Six months with nobody running Labor, and the week they finally fill the chair, America's two biggest labor stories both happen somewhere he's got no say: a grocery chain picks everyone's shirt color and a union wins its contract in Canada. The desk's full and the reach is empty — that's the con, staff the agency, starve its jurisdiction. Four hundred thousand people in new shirts and not one of them needed a confirmation hearing for that to happen.”
“Six months of acting leadership ends, stability returns to the Department of Labor, exactly the kind of steady hand business was asking for. And look, Kroger set its own dress code and Walmart's deal closed up in Ontario — that just proves markets function fine without Washington getting in the way. Wait, if neither one needed the department, why'd we spend six months fighting over who runs it? Did I say that? That's not the talking point.”
The receipts
Nearly 400,000 in-store workers at the grocery giant are now required to wear company-issued shirts.
· Walmart workers win their first contract in North America! from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026
· On Labor Day, Mamdani Announces First-of-Its-Kind 'Office of Worker Power' in NYC from the morgue, 7 Sep 2026
· On Labor Day, Workers World says: Support immigrants! ICE out! from the morgue, 22 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.