California Legislature Refuses to Unionize Its own Employees

Columnist Dan Walters of Calmatters.org notes Wednesday that the California State Legislature has once again exempted itself from a rule that it imposes on everyone else — this time, allowing its workers to join unions.

Walters writes:

The Legislature’s dominant Democrats have bent over backwards to help unions organize workers in private and public employment, from those who work in the state’s agricultural fields to those who build electric cars for Tesla. And a substantial number of those legislators are former union members and organizers themselves.

However, the Legislature’s own employees are forbidden to join unions. They are “at will” workers who can be fired by their bosses at a moment’s notice and for any reason with no recourse.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a San Diego Democrat and a former union official herself, proposed to close that loophole but ran into obvious reluctance from her colleagues and legislative leaders.

…

Privately, Gonzalez Fletcher says, she runs into assertions that the Legislature is unique and that having unions would inhibit its functions.

In effect, therefore, legislators have the same objections to unionization that other employers often express when the Legislature passes laws to facilitate organizing their workers.

Read Walters’s full article here.

The legislature has come in for criticism in recent months due to the high number of complaints about sexual harassment that have emerged in the wake of the “#metoo” movement.

One of the female leaders of that movement, California State Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), has herself been accused of sexual misconduct.

The legislature has also suffered several corruption scandals in recent years, while Democrats have been slow to remove members of their own party even after they were convicted of crimes.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.