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Pro-union proponents failed for the fourth time to get a bill through the California State Assembly that would grant employees of the legislature the right to unionize.
Every election season, Democratic state legislators from California and Massachusetts feature endorsements from labor unions prominently on their campaign websites to show their pro-worker bona fides. These endorsements are often the result of those legislators’ genuinely pro-labor voting records and support for collective-bargaining rights. You might think this support would also extend to the staffers these legislators rely on. If you did, for now at least, you’d be wrong.
Last Wednesday, on the final night of the legislative session, the California State Assembly killed a bill that would grant employees of the legislature the right to unionize. This marked the fourth time pro-union proponents failed to get a bill through the legislature, and it came a little over one month after the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts also refused to recognize the union of staffers in the state Senate.
The latest death of the bill in California came after a hopeful showing in the state Senate, which passed the measure by a 31-to-2 margin, but was followed by an evening of dramatics in the Assembly’s Public Employment and Retirement Committee. Chair Jim Cooper pulled the bill without a hearing (followed by boos and hissing from the crowd of staffers), only to reverse that decision, harangue presenters about not talking to him about the bill previously (which they claim they did), and finally hold a vote in which the bill failed to pass the committee, getting two yes votes, three nos, and two abstentions. Assemblymember Tina McKinnor plans to reintroduce the bill in December, but it must start from the beginning of the legislative process.
This was the fourth time the bill died in or before reaching committee. Its latest iteration, Assembly Bill 1577, was introduced in a maneuver called “gut and amend” by Assemblymember Mark Stone, which allowed it to bypass some of its committee sticking points, but ultimately hit a wall with Cooper’s committee.
In equally Democratic-dominated Massachusetts, Senate staffers had attained a majority of union authorization cards and hoped that Senate President Karen Spilka would voluntarily recognize their effort. But Spilka refused to recognize the union, citing legal complexities—a strange reason from the head of a body that creates and amends laws. Spilka’s office and the Office of the Senate Counsel did not respond to requests for comment.
Pro-union staffers like Evan Berry sounded undeterred. “We have never shied away from legislation because it’s too tough or too challenging,” he told the Prospect. The Massachusetts State House Employee Union, an affiliate of IBEW that includes staffers from both chambers of the legislature, plans to continue their organizing effort.
Attempts at union representation in state legislatures are not unprecedented. In the past two years, Oregon State Legislature staffers became the first state legislature employees in the nation to unionize, and staff of eight congressional offices have filed petitions for union elections.
Pro–staff union proponents in California took a different route than Massachusetts, seeking to avoid legal snags by extending the right to collectively bargain to employees of the legislature. Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, formerly one of the most pro-union members (actually, the most) of the California State Assembly, who now leads the California Labor Federation (the state’s AFL-CIO), introduced a bill before she switched jobs that would amend current state law governing collective bargaining between public employees and the state to include workers in the legislature.
About 16 percent of responding staffers were food-insecure, and almost half said they weren’t able to support themselves and their dependents on their current salary.
Asked why the ostensibly pro-labor California legislature (where Democrats hold three-fourths of the seats in each house) is dragging its feet, Gonzalez Fletcher told the Prospect that her former colleagues’ lack of experience and fear of working in a unionized workplace were among the factors. Some legislators feared that staffers would become like civil servants, staying on even after the senator or representative they worked for lost elections. “There’s still a lot of trepidation,” added Gonzalez Fletcher. “I’ve had so many discussions with legislators to explain nothing that’s in our civil service code would necessarily be in a contract. That would be determined at the bargaining table if they chose to form a union. For some reason, that’s a really hard concept for people to understand.” As they serve in essentially political positions, she added, it’s unlikely that staffers would negotiate to stay on to work for their boss’s replacement, who could well be from a different political party.
Gonzalez Fletcher has been, to put it mildly, vocal about her support for staffers’ right to unionize since she left office to head the state’s labor movement. After AB 1577’s failure to pass Cooper’s committee, she took to Twitter to call Cooper a “liar” for asserting proponents had not tried to work with him on the bill. Cooper responded by tweeting that Gonzalez Fletcher had called him last night, apparently intimating that she was scrambling last-minute to save the bill; she said she had called him by mistake when trying to give his number to someone else. In the Wednesday committee hearing, Stone said that he had reached out to Cooper in July, who referred Stone to his staff—who never responded to Stone.
Some of the anti-union or union-hesitant arguments presented in Massachusetts were also familiar to Gonzalez Fletcher. Massachusetts state Sen. Will Brownsberger cited a problem with the union’s choice of IBEW, saying that because that union often lobbies legislators on pending legislation, there would be a conflict of interest. In a revealing choice of words reported by Boston public radio, Brownsberger said, “You can’t have people serving multiple masters, that’s just not acceptable.”
But this isn’t the first time organized labor has dealt with what some see as conflicts of interest. Gonzalez Fletcher gave the example of unionized journalists: “If writers can be in a union and write about all union issues, it’s because they take the steps necessary to preserve their professional detachment. There’s no reason a union can’t do that in representing staff.” Berry noted that staffers had chosen IBEW because of the union’s relatively low level of political involvement in the Commonwealth’s legislature.
Extensive workloads, low pay, and lack of institutional support have been long-standing problems in state legislatures—problems that disproportionately harm staffers from disadvantaged backgrounds. According to a 2021 survey of Massachusetts Senate staffers by Beacon BLOC, an organization created by staffers of color, about 16 percent of responding staffers were food-insecure, and almost half said they weren’t able to support themselves and their dependents on their current salary.
In June, the Massachusetts state Senate gave staffers a raise, following years of worker complaints and a National Conference of State Legislatures report on staffers’ compensation, mandating a starting annual salary of a little over $50,000, about a 10 percent boost from the previous floor. The new system requires all jobs to be classified and assigned a pay grade with a salary range, according to The Boston Globe, aligning pay levels with those of judiciary and executive staffers, who are unionized. No pay boost was offered in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, whose workers haven’t yet submitted union authorization cards.
COVID-19 brought staffers an additional set of stresses, with much of the responsibility for pandemic response left to them with little guidance. “There were so many constituent services cases that were really dire and serious that we had to deal with,” said Ravi Simon, a staffer at the Massachusetts House of Representatives. “Unemployment spiked, the Department of Unemployment was sort of a mess, and lots of people had issues and needed help getting their money—often, people who were on the verge of eviction.”
This confluence of issues has led to high staff turnover. Berry reports that prior to signing his union card, he personally knew of 40 staffers that left the state house. He estimates the number departures to be much higher, likely in the hundreds since he started working at the State House in 2018.
All of the founders of Beacon BLOC have left the State House, many due to financial insecurity and dysfunctional working conditions. Mark Martinez, a co-founder of the group who left the State House for his own electoral bid, said that many of the problems that Beacon BLOC had flagged would be solved or ameliorated through unionization of the staff, which also builds off a legacy of staff organizing against sexual harassment.
Martinez, a former organizer for the staffers’ union who served as counsel to Sen. Pat Jehlen, the chair of the Massachusetts Senate’s labor committee, sees legacy organized labor in Massachusetts as partially to blame for not pushing the legislature harder to accept the staffers’ union. Blocking the union, he says, should come at a political cost for Spilka. “I think [labor unions] have a misunderstanding of the power that they have … If I’m a member of these unions, I’m telling anyone that is endorsed by me, ‘No, you don’t get to vote for a Senate president that denied a labor union.’”
“That’s the power that [unions] have, but they’re of course not going to do that. I don’t think that labor in Massachusetts uses the full flex of their power in the ways that I think that they should. I’m not saying they should come in and force [the legislature’s] hand [on every issue]. But they’ve got to use it somewhere; I’ve yet to see them use it anywhere.”
Staffers in both Massachusetts and California plan to continue fighting to win union recognition.
