Staff for a California Legislative Union

Dear Colleague,

We’re excited to enter a new session with a new set of members and legislative changes. We are staff that believe this is the moment to share a vision of a union we can organize together. 

Critically, we as staff need to bolster our community against problematic restructuring from Rules without our input. We are all here because of our passion for making California better; to support our staff is to support a stronger California. Our teams of legislative employees carefully manage thousands of constituent cases that keep people housed and fed, work dozens of bills on behalf of our elected officials to change the lives of Californians for the better, and communicate the work being done to the communities we represent. 

But, if you haven’t heard: new member offices in the Assembly are limited to unreasonably low staffing levels of just seven staff total, for both district and capitol offices. As already-understaffed offices can tell you, constituents will quickly feel the strain. There is potential further problematic restructuring in both houses in preparation for “dealing with a union” such as eliminating Communications Director roles and further excluding other legislative staff from unionizing, to be determined solely by Rules. Reducing our capacity to provide services and, therefore, increasing workload for other personal staff–as well as committee staff –will increase burnout and lead to a lack of retention. The latest changes are a recognized union-busting tactic: pitting staff against each other under threat of taking each other’s jobs. These threats are a disservice to constituents. We can expect a great many more frustrating and troubling threats to surface in the coming session if we don’t start talking about how we want the workplace to change, to ensure our legislative bodies have what they need to support California. By joining together now to discuss how we’d like to improve the Legislature, we can structure our workplace for the better.

The possibility of a union was effective enough to raise the salary floor across houses. Paying some of us for campaign work over the last month is also our collective success, as leadership began to acknowledge we should be valued and supported for all of our work–not just what we do during business hours. At this same time, we must recognize that the lack of equity in recent pay adjustments is a good example of what happens when workers are not at the table. Until we are a part of conversations, we should expect “preparing to deal with a union” to remain misguided and unrepresentative. There are a lot of issues we’d like to address, but we know our priority needs to be on targeted issues that we can tangibly change, and we need to bring these ideas forward now. 

As Rules prepares to negotiate with a collective bargaining unit, it’s important for us to share what we need in order to keep the Legislature working effectively for California. Please start having these conversations in your offices and with your colleagues. We’ve also created an anonymous survey for you to share your voice now. This form allows you to submit stories to develop a comprehensive picture of what we need from the Legislature, so that we can keep doing the public policy work we care so much about. Whether your Workplace Conduct Unit complaint went ignored; your raise was frozen, rejected, or low-balled beyond dignity; or you have any other issue you think could be addressed together, let us know. We won’t share it unless you want us to. You can submit your perspective here: 

https://bit.ly/CaLegUnionSurvey

We’re always here to help and we’re hoping you’ll join our efforts soon to help out too. Please let us know if you have any questions about how we can work together.

Sincerely,

CLU