Walsh to NHL Players union: source
U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, the former mayor of Boston, appears set to be on his way out of the Biden administration and into a new role heading the National Hockey League players union, a source confirmed.
The NHL Players Association was rumored to be zeroing in on Walsh last week, and now it’s a done deal, as first reported by the hockey blog Daily Faceoff and confirmed to the Herald by a source familiar with the negotiations.
Walsh, a longtime union leader from Dorchester, served two terms as mayor of Boston, first elected in 2014. He left in 2021 to become his friend President Biden’s head of the Department of Labor, 14th in the line of presidential succession.
A move to the NHLPA, succeeding Donald Fehr in that role, would likely come with an extremely sizable pay bump from the $203,100-a-year chunk he was breaking off from the federal government, which is actually right around what he’d been making as mayor of Boston when he departed.
Walsh is a big Boston sports fan. Indeed, part of his personal story crosses with the Bruins — in his discussions about getting sober, he cites an instance in 1995 of getting thrown out of a B’s game in the old Boston Garden as part of a weekend bender in which he says he hit rock bottom.
The then-Laborers 223 union official from Dorchester has been sober ever since. He won election to a Dorchester-centric state rep seat two years later and continued his political ascendance from there.
In 2013, by that point head of the Boston Building Trades and still a state representative, Walsh won election as mayor of Boston. He’d be re-elected in 2017, and remained popular through the pandemic and up until he left.
Walsh’s tenure as Labor secretary largely has avoided any trips to the penalty box; he mainly served as an cheerleader for the president’s economic agenda and he helped resolve several significant labor issues, including impending rail strikes and a looming Major League Baseball lockout — getting his feet wet in the prosports labor scene. Otherwise, he mainly made the news in low-impact bright stories whenever people from other parts of the country were amused by his thick Boston accent or when he invoked Southie treasure Doughboy Donuts & Deli in his easygoing confirmation hearing.
His seven-plus years leading Boston did feature a few kerfuffles, most notably two federal investigations into allegations that City Hall had been involved in strong-arm tactics to force events to use union labor.
He continues to split time between Boston and Washington, D.C., and has been known to continue to make calls about local issues in the Hub even since he departed City Hall.
This comes after Walsh’s friend former Gov. Charlie Baker took a seat helming the NCAA.