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Sonderling Discusses Fighting Workplace Antisemitism and the Labor Market After RJC Summit

September 14, 2026 · USDepartmentofLabor · 0:08:48

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What happened

Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling spoke with JNS after addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition summit, in an interview rendered in Arabic auto-captions and paraphrased here from that transcript. Sonderling, who described himself as a grandson of Holocaust survivors, said the Trump administration had made eliminating antisemitism and other religious bigotry a priority, and that the President had given agencies a green light to pursue schools and companies that discriminate against Jewish employees. He described Labor Department tools including a faith center launched under this administration with an interactive fifty-state tool showing federal and state religious protections and a portal for reporting antisemitism.

Sonderling warned that employer use of artificial intelligence in hiring could worsen bias if systems flag Jewish applicants through surnames, origins or affiliations such as Jewish community centers. He cited a survey, as he stated it, in which one in four hiring managers expressed bias against Jewish people, and he listed forms of discrimination ranging from slurs to barring kippahs at work, forcing Orthodox employees to shave beards on safety grounds where alternatives exist, and refusing Jewish holiday leave or schedule adjustments. He said the EEOC had reached a historic $21 million settlement with Columbia University, which he described as the largest antisemitism settlement in U.S. history.

Asked about unions, Sonderling said unions count as employers under the law and that the department was raising awareness among union leadership, citing a case he raised in his speech in which Jewish members who objected to a union’s anti-Israel position were called slurs and the matter was settled. He said the department works with federal partners including Leo Terrell, whom he praised as the administration’s lead on antisemitism.

Turning to the labor market, Sonderling said reshoring industry was central to the President’s second-term campaign, pointing to returning auto manufacturing, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals and advanced agriculture. He said President Trump had created 900,000 new private-sector jobs in his second term, as he stated the figure, and that the Labor Department was pushing an apprenticeship model in which industry sets curricula and workers earn while they learn, without debt, because many four-year degree holders lacked the skills the new high-wage jobs require, in his telling.

Why it matters

The interview links the Labor Department’s civil-rights enforcement docket, including the Columbia settlement figure Sonderling cited, to its workforce-training agenda, showing how the department presents both as one mission under this administration.

Sources: USDepartmentofLabor, “Secretary Keith Sonderling interview after RJC (JNS)”, 2026-09-14 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-09-14). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.