It's the only sanctuary state out there, the state where there are real restrictions on the extent to which cops can cooperate with ICE. It continues to push the envelope on climate change legislation, and, with New York, has mandated that its minimum wage rise to $15 an hour over the next few years.
But Jonathan Lasner, a very enterprising reporter with the Southern California News Group—a chain of California papers currently being decimated by its private equity owners—has come up with a truly mind-boggling index of the Golden State’s progressivism. Since the Great Recession ended—that is, from 2011 through 2017—fully 59 percent of all new union jobs have been created in California.
To be sure, that's a high percentage of a low number. Lasner has combed through the Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual state-by-state count of union members, and discovered that union ranks in California grew by 60,000 during those seven years. In the other 49 states combined, they grew by 42,000 members.
Any quantitative comparison of California with other states should have California coming out on top, of course, simply because California has far and away the most residents. But to have more of anything than all the other states combined reflects not just the state's size, but also its economic and political climate. Unlike Republican-run states, California's government isn't enacting policies that shrink unions, while California has also been creating jobs—albeit most of them pretty bad—in huge numbers in recent years.
That, in turn, leads to a more depressing take on California's union gains: That increase of 60,000 unionized jobs comes to a mere 2.8 percent of the total number of new jobs created in the state since January 2011. Really, it's a drop in the bucket—but a bigger drop than the other states put together.
