State legislators sometimes exempt themselves from the laws they pass, but this session, they could change course on an emblamatic bill: To allow their own staffers to form a union.
California legislators pass hundreds of laws every year. But sometimes, they free themselves from following them.
On one emblamatic issue, however, this may be the session when that changes: Lawmakers, who have pushed through major bills to support unions throughout California, may finally let their own staffers organize.
For at least the fifth time in the last 25 years, the effort came to an anticlimactic end last year as a legislative unionization bill passed the state Senate, but failed in an Assembly committee on the last day of the session.
This year, there are a lot of pieces in place that could help the new push. For one: the amount of turnover in what is now California’s most diverse Legislature ever .
The legislation was revived — and highlighted as Assembly Bill 1 on the first day of the current session Dec. 5 — by new Assemblymember Tina McKinnor, who leads the committee where it has died four out of the five times it has been proposed.
“It is hypocritical as legislators that we ask our employees to staff committees and write legislation that often expands collective bargaining rights for other workers in California, but we intentionally prohibit our own workers from having the same right,” the Inglewood Democrat said at a press conference introducing the bill in December.
In...
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a legal complaint in a federal court in the Southern District of Florida to shut down tax return preparers Cedric Reid and Juan Santana, along with their b...