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Issues and Legislation
Times are bleak for California’s working families. We’re losing 50,000 jobs a month, spiking California’s unemployment to a post-World War II record. For those who still have a job, wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living. Budget cuts, furloughs, and foreclosures have unhinged our state’s once stable middle class. Food banks and shelters now overflow with families who can no longer make ends meet. Our social safety net has shredded and no longer supports the most vulnerable among us.
The perfect storm of job loss, slashed wages, massive cuts in state spending and skyrocketing health care costs threatens to drown any chance of an economic recovery. In construction, our members are seeing unemployment rates of up to 30 percent. Tens of thousands of school employees have lost their jobs. State workers are suffering from a 15 percent wage cut due to furloughs and are working without a contract. Public and private sector workers are being paid less to do more, facing additional layoffs, wage and benefit reductions and the constant fear of losing their jobs. The only way for California to emerge from this deep, dark recession is to invest in the creation of good jobs with decent pay and benefits.
Labor's 2010 Legislative Agenda focuses on attracting good jobs to the state, putting Californians to work, repairing the state safety net, promoting corporate transparency and accountability, protecting workers rights and implementing a Middle Class Bill of Rights. Read the complete 2010 Legislative Agenda.
Offshoring of Jobs
The current "jobless" economic recovery has done little to help working people in California. Hundred of thousands of jobs in the U.S. have disappeared over the past three years, and unemployed workers are out of work for longer than they have been in decades.
Union Organizing
While the federal National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) establishes that workers have the right to join unions, it provides for a union election that is unlike any real democratic election—because one side has all the power. In a NLRA election, the employer can prohibit workers from talking about the union, harass workers who support the union, and intimidate workers with few, if any, repercussions.
Majority Sign-Up or “Card Check”
Majority sign-up, or “card check,” is a better way for workers to choose whether or not to join a union. Under majority sign-up, workers have the chance to talk to each other about the union without facing the same kind of employer harassment. Instead of waiting months or even years for an election while the employer runs an anti-union campaign, workers who want a union simply sign cards asking the union to represent them in collective bargaining. This is a fair and democratic process that respects the will of the majority.
Meal Breaks
The right of workers to take a guaranteed lunch break is fundamental, but the Schwarzenegger administration and some employer groups continue trying to undermine meal period rights.
Minimum Wage
Indexing the minimum wage to inflation is the only way to ensure that minimum wage workers can begin to escape poverty. And it is not only the right thing to do, but it also enjoys broad public support. Seventy-three percent of voters support indexing the minimum wage to inflation.
Immigrant Workers
In October 2007, the federal district court ruled to continue to protect workers from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) illegal plan to use social security records as an immigration enforcement tool. The DHS plan to use ‘no-match’ letters, which notify employers if their employee forms do not match the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) error-prone data, is a misguided way of threatening employers and causing the senseless firing of countless workers.