California on Strike

Strike 338, you’re out.

Over the past two years, California has led – by far – the nation in strikes.

While the current Hollywood and hotel worker strikes are the most visible, the state has seen hundreds of others since January, 2021.

Not only is the raw number larger – as would be expected, being the largest state in the union, for now, it is also proportionately larger than any other state.  Texas, for example, had about 30 strikes during the same time period.

This pattern holds true when comparing other red/blue states as well.  New York has a population that is 10% smaller than Florida’s but saw four times the number of strikes – 100 versus 24, according to the Cornell University Labor Action Tracker.

Clearly, the respective general political environments – and the power of the unions –  play a major role in the number of strikes.

That unions – especially government unions – play an enormously outsized role in California politics should not come as a surprise.  From the teachers dropping about $40,000 every day on politics and lobbying, to the SEIU getting whatever they want whenever they want from their in-pocket legislators, public worker unions have been the bane of responsible and reasonable government efforts for 50 years.

Earlier this week, SEIU employees in Los Angeles decided to strike for a day, apparently in part out of the “disrespect” they feel.  From the union website: 

We walked off the job because we’re tired of the empty promises, we’re tired of the never ending understaffing and unfulfilled vacancies, we’re tired of City’s law-breaking, and we’re fed up with City management’s disrespect.

As with that walkout, many recent union actions – particularly during the pandemic – have seemed to focus less on typical union issues like pay and benefits and safety and more on esoteric, purely political issues like ending “systemic racism” and creating government-run health care for all.

Sheriden Swanson, research manager at the California Policy Center, said both the unions and the state government consciously foster a sense of dependence that creates a feedback loop with increased labor and progressive political activism.

“The message coming from the state government and the unions is ‘you need us,’” Swanson said.   “California and the unions tell working people they need to be protected from capitalism and big business — and I admit that to a degree, big business poses problems in terms of monopolies. But California goes beyond traditional anti-trust law, and the subliminal message is that they don’t have the agency to advocate for themselves and work hard to find and keep well-paying jobs and that they need government and the unions to force their employers to guarantee them a certain amount of pay.”

The California Labor Federation – which coined the motto “Hot Labor Summer” for this year – did not respond to multiple requests for comment. That being said, to get a flavor of what they probably would have said if they thought they had to explain themselves, here’s the latest Federation blog post. 

This confluence of power – funded, through union dues, by the taxpayers the state and the workers are meant to serve – goes beyond mere momentary machinations and has had and is having deleterious real-world consequences for the state.

Swanson notes the focus of teachers unions, for example, is on pretty much everything except teaching children how to read and write to be able to succeed in the future.

“Instead, they have pushed social activism into classrooms,” Swanson said. “The unions and the state government together have created an environment where the question is no longer, ‘What is the labor I’m doing worth, and what value does it contribute to the workplace/marketplace?’ but rather, ‘I think I need X amount and therefore the institution I work for owes it to me.’”

And the option to strike could soon become more attractive. It is excepted that within a few days a bill will be introduced in Sacramento that would allow striking workers to access unemployment benefits once they have been on strike for a few weeks or so.

Besides yet again trying to use the atrocious “gut and amend” trick to pass a shady bill, the idea is both antithetical to the idea of unemployment insurance – you don’t qualify if you decide to stop working – and financially farcical.

The state unemployment agency is already more than $18 billion in debt to the feds, has – since the beginning of the month – been borrowing another $20 million per day to meet its current “actually unemployed people” benefit obligations, and is, in fact, structurally insolvent.

The “hot labor summer” could end up leading to a cold budgetary winter.