Could California soon have a union for legislative staff? Lawmakers will decide this week

Yesenia Jimenez remembers a time not too long ago when the idea of a legislative union felt like a faraway dream.

Few people spoke openly about it when she first started at the Capitol as a Senate fellow in 2019. Jimenez, who later became an Assembly legislative aide, recalled hearing about a bill that would give staff the right to unionize. But more seasoned legislative employees told her that the proposal didn’t stand much of a chance. Many staffers at the time, she said, were fearful that voicing their support for a union, even privately, could damage their careers.

“There was always that desire there, but I think there was more so an expectation that it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Jimenez told The Bee.

Now, four years later, Jimenez and many other current and former staff members are watching intently as California lawmakers – many of whom champion unions and labor issues – decide this week whether to grant their own staff the same rights.

Assembly Bill 1 marks at least the fifth attempt to give staff a union and has progressed further than any of the previous iterations. Former Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher led many of those efforts as a lawmaker and now heads the California Labor Federation, AB 1’s main sponsor.

If passed, AB 1 would give legislative employees the legal right to organize and collectively bargain with the Assembly and Senate Rules Committees starting in 2026. The original bill would have been effective two years earlier, but amendments made in the Senate labor committee extended the timeline.

Assemblymember Tina McKinnor (D-Inglewood), a former Assembly chief of staff herself, resurrected the bill after last year’s effort died at the eleventh hour in the Assembly Public Employment and Retirement committee, which she now chairs. She said her own personal experiences in the building, plus watching the bill’s demise in 2022, inspired her to take it up.

Senators approved the bill 30-3 late Tuesday afternoon.

“I have tears, this is like having my baby,” McKinnor said shortly after the vote on Tuesday. “When I thought about running, I thought, ‘I’m running for this. When I get here, I’m going to carry this bill. I’m going to make sure that I clean up for staff.’ And I’m so excited that we’ve gotten this far.”

AB 1 will return to the Assembly for a concurrence vote likely on Wednesday, and McKinnor said she feels confident that the votes are there. The Assembly originally passed the bill with a 68-5 vote back in May.

McKinnor amassed 42 co-authors from both chambers, including Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) and Senator Dave Cortese (D-Santa Clara), chair of the Senate labor committee.

Staff say a union would give them the protection to speak up about workplace issues, such as sexual harassment and other office misconduct, and also allow them to bargain for better wages and overtime eligibility. Former employees have testified before committees that they’ve felt pressured to complete duties outside their job description without proper compensation, such as approving payroll or even assembling a member’s IKEA furniture. Some have also had to use vacation time to campaign for members.

“If you’re all for unions, then you should let your workers have a chance to potentially be represented by a union,” said Robert Cruz, a current Assembly legislative aide who voiced support for the bill during its first hearing before the Assembly public employment committee.

Most of all, McKinnor said, union representation would give legislative employees reassurance that they have someone looking out solely for their interests.

“I fell in love with this bill because staff doesn’t have any representation in the building,” McKinnor told The Bee earlier this year. “Our HR is really Rules – the Rules committee – and they’re here for the members.”

McKinnor feels confident that the bill will make it all the way to the governor’s desk this year. She said she hasn’t yet spoken with Newsom’s administration, but she looks forward to discussing the bill with his staff and hopes he’ll sign it.

“I don’t want to jinx myself. I don’t want to get too excited because I have one more step to go,” McKinnor said Tuesday. “He’s a fair man. I have every faith that he will sign the bill.”

Why do staff want a union?

Usually a policy trailblazer, California lags behind other states such as Washington, Oregon and Maine that have already given their staff the right to organize. Congressional aides are pushing for unions in both the House and Senate, despite an attempt by House Republicans to neutralize those efforts earlier this year.

State civil service workers won the right to unionize in 1977 with the passage of the Ralph C. Dills Act, and 13 of the state’s 21 collective bargaining units negotiated new contracts this year. That law notably excluded from civil service any worker appointed or employed by the Legislature.

Academic workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses made headlines last year when they walked out on strike – a right they also earned in 1977 when the state granted K-12 and higher education employees the right to collectively bargain.

“It’s clearly long overdue,” Jimenez said. “Staffers do the work. They show up every day, and sometimes that day turns into 9 a.m. to literally past midnight.”

The end of the legislative year is always a grind. Marathon floor sessions often extend late into the evening with members jockeying for votes and cutting last-minute deals to push bills through.

The days can get so busy that aides don’t even have time to dash out for a quick meal, Jimenez said. When she worked in the Legislature, her bosses would order food so everyone could fuel up for the long hours ahead. But not all members did that, Jimenez said, and word traveled quickly about who had food and who didn’t.

“I actually would have friends come over to our office to eat food because they didn’t have a break,” Jimenez said. “It was a normalized expectation that certain offices were just not going to do that for their staff.”

A union would be an opportunity to restore work-life balance for employees, giving them time to rest, regroup and spend time with their families, she said.

One first-time Assembly legislative assistant, who asked to remain unnamed to guard against retaliation, said newer progressive members with ambitious goals (like his boss) push staff hard.

The assistant, who just recently graduated from college, was the point person for seven different pieces of legislation this year – a lot for a first-time staffer. He also was responsible for analyzing and briefing his boss on all the bills in ten broad issue areas – including education, public safety and human services – so that the member knew what the bills did, who supported them and whether staff recommended a yes or no vote.

“It’s one thing to say you’re pro-labor, and it’s another to treat your staff like you’re pro-labor,” said Elle Chen, a former senior Assembly legislative aide who staffed last year’s AB 1577 for Assemblymember Mark Stone.

Also central to the union push is a desire for more protections for staff who bring forward allegations of workplace misconduct and harassment. McKinnor was one of 140 women who signed on to an explosive Los Angeles Times op-ed in 2017 that called out a “pervasive” culture of abusive behavior by men in California’s institutions of power.

The letter, written by a group known as We Said Enough, helped spark the #MeToo movement within the statehouse and led to the 2019 creation of the Workplace Conduct Unit, an independent panel tasked with investigating workplace issues. In 2021, the group criticized the unit as being too close to the Legislature to provide truly independent investigations into allegations of misconduct and sexual harassment.

AB 1 would, as McKinnor put it, formalize the Legislature’s human resources structure and protect workers who come forward with complaints.

Why AB 1 may succeed where past bills failed

Many factors have given supporters of AB 1 hope this year. Chief among them was the Legislature’s leftward shift after the 2022 midterm election, which brought in a fresh class of diverse, progressive and labor-friendly Democrats.

Previous attempts were stymied not by a vocal, well-funded opposition, but strategic inaction from certain members that kept the legislation from passing committees, or even reaching them in the first place.

Gonzalez Fletcher introduced the bill three times during her tenure in the Assembly. Twice it died in the Assembly public employment and committee. Her final effort in 2021 died at the Assembly desk without even being assigned to a committee.

Last year’s bill, carried by former Assemblyman Mark Stone, died in that same committee at the hands of then-Assemblymember Jim Cooper, the former committee chair who now serves as Sacramento County Sheriff. Cooper first blocked the bill from being heard, prompting boos from staffers who left the chamber. Later, he allowed Stone to present the measure, but It but it failed on a 2-4 vote after Cooper recommended a “no” vote.

“One of the reasons I held this is to not make members take a hard vote,” he said at the end of the committee hearing. “I believe in protecting my members on this committee, 100%. That’s what leaders do. Get on Facebook. I don’t care. Get on Twitter. I don’t care. It’s about doing what’s right.”

Former Assemblymember Ken Cooley, the longtime Rules Committee chair who staffers say doomed previous versions of the bill, argued that California’s legislature was too unique to take a “photocopy” approach to collective bargaining. In the Assembly committee hearing that ultimately killed last year’s unionization bill, Cooley made the case that each member’s office operates effectively as its own employer, and to apply uniform employment standards across offices was an unprecedented step in California.

“We have 120 individuals with a reset every two years, all of them with constitutional standing,” he said. “There is no body like this to which these rules apply.”

Cooley also brought up concerns about legislative spending caps put in place by Proposition 140. Collective bargaining agreements, he argued, might push the Legislature to spend beyond its means.

Concerns about Proposition 140 have not been brought up this year, according to Sean Porter, McKinnor’s legislative director and the lead staffer on AB 1. Gonzalez Fletcher has previously dismissed such concerns, saying that spending limits could be a condition of bargaining and would not present an unsolvable problem.

“Like at a business, you can’t spend more on salaries than money you take in,” she said in a message to The Bee on Monday.

Another concern that was raised in various committee analyses this year was the question of who would oversee workplace disputes between the newly created union and the employer. The bill identifies the Public Employment Relations Board, or PERB, as the logical choice for resolving these claims, as it does for state civil servants and school employees.

But since PERB is an arm of the state’s executive branch, questions lingered over whether the board could serve as a referee over labor disputes within the legislative branch without running afoul of separation of powers rules.

Several amendments out of the Senate Judiciary Committee sought to address the constitutionality issues.

The bill excludes from collective bargaining any “department or office leader” who bears responsibility for hiring, firing and managing staff, as well as “confidential employees” who mainly work in human resources. The bill gives the Assembly and Senate Rules committees the sole discretion to exclude up to a third of employees from collective bargaining. The rules committees, rather than PERB, also have sole discretion over the makeup of each bargaining unit. Employees cannot be divided into units based on political party affiliation.

Legislative union could indirectly influence future legislation

If the Senate and governor approve AB 1, the law wouldn’t go into effect until July 1, 2026. McKinnor said it’s important to give staff enough time to organize themselves and choose a union representative. Meanwhile, the employer needs time to write detailed job descriptions that outline the duties and responsibilities associated with each classification.

“We want to do it right the first time,” McKinnor said.

Even if the bill manages to die this week, or if Newsom vetoes it and lawmakers can’t find the votes for an override, Chen suspects it will keep coming back until it passes.

If the statehouse wants to attract and retain talented young staff members from diverse backgrounds, Chen said, then it needs to pay wages that allow those employees to stay in the job for more than a year. Frequently staffers will leave the Capitol for higher-paying jobs in lobbying, or careers where the work-life balance is better.

A legislative staff union could deliver those wins to staffers and as a result, lead to a more socioeconomically diverse makeup of staff. They would bring their life experiences into their work and, potentially, advance policies that are more inclusive of lower-income and communities of color, Chen said.

“It really matters who’s in the room and who’s working for whom,” Chen said. “This bill was so utterly personal, and it will impact every piece of legislation going forward.”

This story was originally published September 12, 2023 at 7:00 AM.