Longtime SEIU Local 1000 president Yvonne Walker ousted by ‘outsider’ in union election

A self-styled “outsider” has unseated the long-time president of California’s largest state employee union, rising above a crowded candidate field on a campaign platform filled with big promises and unconventional positions.

Richard Louis Brown won the SEIU Local 1000 election, according to results the union posted online Monday afternoon, defeating Yvonne Walker, who has led the union since 2008.

Brown captured 33% of the vote in another low-turnout election. While the union represents about 100,000 state workers — ranging from office assistants to custodians to prison nurses — just 7,880 members voted.

Walker followed with 27% of the vote, according to the results.

Miguel Cordova, an education programs consultant who challenged Walker this year after campaigning with her in 2018, won about 15% of the vote, according to the results.

Tony Owens, an IT specialist and the union’s current vice president of bargaining, won about 14% of the vote, the results show.

Sophia Perkins, an office technician who lost a run against Walker in 2018, received about 10% of the vote, according to the results.

Brown’s campaign platform called for eliminating political spending, cutting membership dues in half, extending voting to non-members, creating a strike fund and vowing to get the state to agree to an unprecedented contract change that would make it easier for union members to strike, among other proposals that opponents called unrealistic.

He used strong rhetoric during his campaign, including saying, “We will bring the state to a standstill, and we’ll run Gavin Newsom out of office one way or another,” in an interview.

He said he would not have agreed to the pay cuts all state employee unions agreed to last summer, when the state faced dire budget predictions that didn’t come to pass.

He stood by his campaign promises in an interview Tuesday, while acknowledging he will have to work with the 60-plus members of the union’s board on major changes.

“I’ve done all this talking, and now I’ve got to produce,” he said.

The union, with its wide-ranging membership, has been losing dues-paying members in recent years. Membership stood at 54% last August, down three percentage points from just six months earlier, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis.

Walker retained the presidency in 2018 even as her running mates were defeated. She never managed to smooth over differences with elected vice presidents — Kevin Menager, Anica Walls and Owens — who replaced her deputies. In 2019, the union’s board of directors voted to reduce by three quarters the amount of time the vice presidents were able to use for union business.

Walker said she has no plans to protest the election’s result.

“Every election you go into there’s always the possibility that you lose,” she said in an interview Tuesday. “To be honest I would have preferred to have won, but I didn’t, so there you go.”

She called Brown to congratulate him as soon as the votes were tallied by a third-party vendor Monday in Roseville, Brown said.

“The members have chosen,” Walker said Tuesday. “Richard will step up and be the leader he needs to be. I think it’ll be OK.”

Local 1000 members also chose the union’s three vice presidents. They elected Perkins’ running mate David Jimenez as secretary-treasurer, a vice presidential position currently held by Menager. They re-elected Walls, the vice president for organizing and representation, who also campaigned with Perkins. And they elected Irene Green, who campaigned with Walker, for vice president of bargaining.

Under timelines outlined in SEIU’s governing documents, Walker will remain in office through upcoming negotiations with Newsom’s administration over restoring state workers’ pay.

Newsom said in a recent budget address that his administration plans to restore pay for state employees in the new fiscal year, which starts July 1.

The union’s rules call for newly elected presidents to begin their three-year terms on June 30 absent an “unresolved election protest.”

Newsom said pay would be restored for SEIU Local 1000 when he released his updated state budget plan earlier this month. The union’s pay-cut agreement included a unique clause saying that if the governor’s budget didn’t draw money from the rainy day fund, the pay cuts would end.

Among the issues to be negotiated is whether workers will receive scheduled raises that were suspended at the same time their pay was cut. Local 1000’s last contract included a 7% raise over three years, starting with a 2.5% increase employees were supposed to receive on July 1 of last year. That raise was suspended in the pay-cut agreements.

The contract also included health insurance stipends amounting to about $3,100 per year and it increased pay for Local 1000’s lowest-paid workers to $15 per hour sooner than the minimum wage is rising for the rest of California.

Brown has said he will seek a 21% pay raise in the union’s next contract, a much greater general salary increase than is common.

That contract runs through June 30, 2023, which means Brown, whose term ends in June 2024, will lead the union during the next round of contract negotiations.

This story was originally published May 25, 2021 at 5:40 AM.