Public works projects in California aren’t dead but with multiple co-morbidities, they’re in poor health. The most conspicuous example is the high-speed rail, maybe the biggest construction burnout in history. And, if critics of a proposed constitutional amendment are right, it will set a sorry tone for decades to come.
Senate Constitutional Amendment 7, the Right to Organize and Negotiate Act, is a resolution intended to change the state Constitution to “ensure that all Californians have the right to join a union and to negotiate with their employers, through their legally chosen representative” and “to protect their economic well-being and safety at work.”
At the same time, it prohibits any statute or ordinance “that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively over their wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment and workplace safety.”
While this might at first sound like it changes nothing — 16.1% of California workers were union members in 2022, the fourth-highest percentage in the country and up from 15.9% in 2021 — opponents say there’s a deeper pro-union bias that would undermine government operations and negatively impact performance, while at the same time weakening the state economy. It’s likely to produce a bundle of harmful unintended consequences, too.
Shoring up public employee union membership, which is falling in California, is surely one of the amendment’s objectives. Now some would benefit from this: unionized employees who get special treatment and the labor bosses, who are forever seeking more dues.
But it wouldn’t improve government performance and would more likely diminish its capabilities. Public employee “unions have a stranglehold over the operating machinery of government,” says author and lawyer Philip K. Howard. Consequently, unionized government workers become unaccountable, their generous compensation crowds out funding for essential services and they use their political clout to block reforms.
A categorical example of how the unionization of public employees cripples government’s abilities to do its most basic jobs are the under-performing public schools in California, where organized teachers have more muscle than governing boards. Yet the lawmakers behind SCA 7 are fine with handing public employee unions greater influence over policy.
Adding the new constitutional right will also impact public works projects. A coalition of business associations argues the amendment “would create a basis to challenge virtually any state or local government infrastructure, energy, or housing project or procurement proposal,” by both union and non-union interests. This virtually guarantees these projects will be slowed and on occasion entirely shut down as competing factions litigate their differences.
John Moorlach, a former Republican state senator from Costa Mesa, has long battled public-employee unions, as well as their “private-sector cousins,” and regards the union advantages included in the Right to Organize and Negotiate Act as a genuine threat to California. The union bosses “intimidate and control the wheels of bureaucracy in their favor,” says Moorlach. “And SCA 7 is the final straw that makes my case.”
So what other damage could SCA 7 cause?
It would prevent state and local governments from trimming budgets when the cuts reduce public employment, as this could be interpreted as a failure to protect workers’ economic well-being.
In addition, it blocks new environmental protection laws, says law firm Nielsen Merksamer. Environmental protection legislation tends “to result in employment disruption,” and new laws would be “especially difficult to pass post-SCA 7” as it “flatly” “prohibits adoption of state or local laws that reduce private sector employment.”
Opponents, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, further argue the amendment creates “several new classes of potential organizing (workers) currently excluded from collective bargaining,” including, incredibly, “county jail and state prison inmates” and “mental institution patients.”
SCA 7 is likely to be a windfall for trial lawyers. (Whether this is an unintended or fully intended consequence might never be known but we imagine suspicions here run high.) San Francisco labor attorney Greg Rolen says the amendment should be retitled The Plaintiff’s Bar Formal Employment Act, as it will award fees to the prevailing parties’ attorney in lawsuits that are based less on the merits of the cases than the promise of a jackpot for the lawyers.
Moorlach, who is now watching the amendment process unfold from a distance, wonders why the amendment was introduced in the first place. Whatever the motive, adds, “it further proves the nonsense of why Sacramento is so messed up.”
Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.