Thermostatic Opinion on Labor Unions

Many posts have discussed labor unions.

 Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Nearly half of Americans (47%) want labor unions in the U.S. to have more influence than they do today, a record high in the past quarter century and roughly double the 23% who want unions to have less influence. Another 26% want unions’ influence to remain the same.

The share wanting greater union influence is up four percentage points from 2023 after rising almost continuously from a record-low 25% in 2009. Over the same period, the percentage wanting unions to have less influence has fallen from 42% to a record-low 23%.

Fallen Idol: Cesar Chavez

Many posts have discussed Hispanic Americans.

Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes at NYT:

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. Ms. Murguia said she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years.

Recently, more than 50 years later, Ms. Murguia learned that a street near her home in the Central California city of Bakersfield was in the process of being renamed. City officials want to name it in honor of her abuser.

Ms. Murguia and another woman, Debra Rojas, say that Mr. Chavez sexually abused them for years when they were girls, from around 1972 to 1977. He was in his 40s and had become a powerful, charismatic figure who captured global attention as a champion of farmworker rights.

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

The questions raised by The Times about Mr. Chavez, one of the most consequential figures in Mexican American history, set off immediate reverberations and alarmed and disturbed his allies. Even before this article was published, upon learning of the reporters’ inquiries, the U.F.W. canceled its annual celebrations honoring Mr. Chavez, a response to what the union he once led called “profoundly shocking” accusations.

Ms. Murguia and Ms. Rojas, both of whom are now 66, were the daughters of longtime organizers who had marched in rallies alongside Mr. Chavez. He used the privacy of his California office to frequently molest Ms. Murguia, she said. He had known her since she was 8 years old. She became so traumatized that she attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15.

Ms. Rojas said she was 12 when Mr. Chavez first touched her inappropriately, groping her breasts in the same office where he’d meet with Ms. Murguia. When Ms. Rojas was 15, he arranged to have her stay at a motel during a weekslong march through California, she said, and had sexual intercourse with her — rape, under state law, because she was not old enough to consent. (Ms. Murguia said Mr. Chavez molested her but never had intercourse with her.)

The abuse allegations appear to be part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Chavez, much of which has never been publicly revealed. The Times investigation found that Mr. Chavez also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification. His most prominent female ally in the movement, Dolores Huerta, said in an interview that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly.

 

New:
Dolores Huerta writes lengthy statement following @nytimes investigation into Cesar Chavez.

Huerta says she had sexual encounters with Chavez resulting in 2 children.

“I have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farm worker movement…” pic.twitter.com/hdL5KnhSi9

— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) March 18, 2026

Labor 2025

Many posts have discussed labor unions.

Megan Brenan at Gallup:

As Americans prepare to celebrate Labor Day, 68% of U.S. adults approve of labor unions, essentially unchanged from last year’s reading. This is the fifth consecutive year that approval of organized labor has been in the 67% to 71% range, a level last reached in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

When Gallup first measured Americans’ ratings of labor unions in 1936, 72% approved. Approval reached the record high, 75%, in 1953 and 1957 and ranged between 63% and 73% from 1958 through 1967. Then, from 1972 through 2016, approval was lower, with few readings over 60%, including the 48% all-time low recorded in 2009. This was the only time approval fell below the majority level. Since 2017, approval has been above 60%, the longest period at this level since the 1960s.

The latest data, from Gallup’s Aug. 1-20 poll, show a continued wide divergence in partisans’ views of unions, as 90% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 41% of Republicans express approval. All party groups show increased support for unions compared with 2016, though Republican support has declined since peaking at 56% in 2022. That was the only time Republicans’ approval has risen above 50% in the past 25 years.

Minoritarianism

Steven M. Teles, "Minoritarianism Is Everythwere,: National Affairs, spring 2025

In search of the tyranny of the minority, one would be well advised to skip over the nation's capital and look instead to the crazy quilt of jurisdictions in which America's decisions about land use and infrastructure development are made. A growing field of scholarship has shown that America's unusually high level of local control over these decisions has led to a crippling undersupply of housing, coupled with dramatically higher costs for transportation and energy projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

...

A recent report by University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry shows that only a fifth to a quarter of citizens participate in mayoral elections in major cities, that turnout in school-board elections is in the single digits, and that participation in special-district elections is even lower. Those who do turn out tend to be whiter, richer, and older than the electorate as a whole.

Participation is exceptionally high, however, for one group in particular: members of public-sector unions. Ordinary citizens' relatively low election-participation rates provide government's own employees with an enormous comparative advantage, as they have the means, motive, and institutional context to exercise disproportionate power over local governing decisions.

...

The structure of American law leads to a peculiar form of lawmaking. Weak party discipline and congressional individualism make it exceptionally difficult for lawmakers to construct coalitions. Legislators under these conditions have strong incentives to avoid blame. Thus the laws they write have become increasingly vague, often delegating significant lawmaking authority to executive agencies. Having been passed the legislative buck, those agencies in turn transfer a great degree of rulemaking responsibility to professional organizations, whose members fill in the details with codes of "best practice" behind closed doors.

Approval of Organized Labor

 From Gallup:

The Data: Ahead of yesterday's salute to labor in the U.S., 70% of Americans said they approve of labor unions, unwavering from their elevated levels of support in 2023 (67%) and 2022 (71%).

The Trend: Americans' approval of unions has fluctuated over the decades. Approval was 72% in 1936, a year after labor unions gained legal recognition in the U.S. It peaked at 75% in the 1950s and sat at 60% or lower during most of the 1980s and 1990s. The lowest point occurred in 2009, at 48%, but approval has steadily risen since then.

Historical Trends

Union Members 2023

Andrea Hsu at NPR:

Due to rapid growth in nonunion jobs in 2023, the share of U.S. workers who are union members actually fell slightly, according to new numbers from the Labor Department.

Just 10% of the U.S. workforce belonged to unions in 2023, down from 10.1% in 2022. That's the lowest in Labor Department records dating back to 1983

 From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 10.0 percent in 2023, little changed from the previous year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.4 million, also showed little movement over the year. In 1983, the first year for which comparable data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers. These data on union membership are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households that obtains information on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional population age 16 and over. For further information, see the Technical Note in this news release. 

Highlights from the 2023 data: 

--The union membership rate of public-sector workers (32.5 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.0 percent). (See table 3.) 

--The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (32.7 percent) and protective service occupations (31.9 percent). (See table 3.)

--Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.5 percent) than women (9.5 percent). (See table 1.) 

--Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.) 

--Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 86 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($1,090 versus $1,263). (The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)

 --Among states, Hawaii and New York had the highest union membership rates (24.1 percent and 20.6 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina had the lowest (2.3 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively). (See table 5.)

Strike Threat Against a Union

Emily Peck at Axios:

Labor unrest is so intense this year that even labor unions are facing internal staff rebellions.

Driving the news: The field staff of the National Education Association (NEA), the teachers' union, voted unanimously on Monday to authorize a strike.

State of play: The NEA is the largest union in the country, representing about 3 million education professionals from pre-school to graduate school — and its tiny staff of 48 employees has been without a contract since May 2023.

• The vote by the Association of Field Service Employees is the latest sign of the strong labor resurgence. The AFL-CIO is facing similar issues with the union that represents its staff.
• Unless the parties reach a deal this week, a two-day strike would begin Friday at midnight with a picket line in Atlanta at an NEA conference in Atlanta.

Fast Food Compromise in CA

Taryn Luna at LAT:

Fast-food companies agreed over the weekend to pull a California referendum off next year’s ballot that sought to reverse a landmark worker-protections law, forgoing a costly political fight with labor unions over employee pay.

The deal will result in an increase in the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour in April and form a new council of representatives for workers and companies to consider pay bumps in the future, according to sources involved in the negotiations.

Negotiated with the help of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s top advisors, the agreement represents a rare compromise that allows business groups and labor to avoid a ballot fight over repealing a law boosting fast-food wages that could have topped $100 million in campaign spending.

“It is a powerful, amazing day,” said Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California. “The new bill really clears a path for workers to have their victory back.”

Sean Kennedy, the National Restaurant Assn.’s executive vice president of public affairs, said the agreement “protects local restaurant owners from significant threats that would have made it difficult to continue to operate in California. It provides a more predictable and stable future for restaurants, workers and consumers.”

Support for Unions

  

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Labor unions continue to enjoy high support in the U.S., with 67% of Americans approving of them, similar to the elevated level seen in recent years after more than a decade of rising support. Mirroring this trend, Americans have gradually become more likely than a decade ago to want unions’ influence to strengthen and to believe unions benefit various aspects of business and the economy.

In contrast to the incremental changes seen in U.S. adults’ support of unions over time, the new poll documents an unprecedented uptick since the prior measure, in 2018, in perceptions that unions in the country will become stronger in the future than they are today. A third of Americans (34%) believe this today, compared with 19% five years ago and no more than 25% at any time in the trend since 1999.

Taylor Giorno at The Hill:

More than two-thirds of Americans support unions, according to new polling data the AFL-CIO released Tuesday.

Union support is particularly high among young Americans: 88 percent of Americans younger than 30, according to AFL-CIO data.

The public opinion research firm GBAO surveyed 1,200 registered voters between Aug. 1-8 on behalf of the AFL-CIO. Demographics were weighted and balanced to match the estimated voter registration population, with young voters, AAPI voters and union members oversampled.

The pollster reported a 2.8 percent margin of error and a 95 percent confidence level in their findings.

“Do you know how hard it is to get two-thirds of Americans to agree on anything? Let me put it another way: More Americans believe in unions than like chocolate ice cream,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told union organizers and members during the organization’s inaugural “State of the Unions” address.

There have been more than 200 strikes so far in 2023, 10 times more than there were two years ago, said Shuler. She attributed the uptick in part to “corporate greed and inequality.”

The average CEO made 272 times what the average worker made in 2022, the AFL-CIO’s “Executive Paywatch” found. CEOs of S&P 500 companies received an average of $16.7 million last year, the second-highest level in history.

 

Lost Unions

  At WSJ, Elisabeth Messenger argues that unions often put politics ahead of workers:

The American Federation of Teachers, with more than 1.6 million members, paints a rosy picture of financial prosperity, with $152 million in assets and a net financial-position improvement of $15 million since 2020. A closer examination, however, reveals an alarming trend: the union increased its membership dues while losing more than 10,000 members since 2020.

No wonder teachers are turning away from the union when only 34% of its spending goes toward acting on behalf of its members. The AFT diverts large sums to political activities, supporting left-wing causes and candidates, taking no account of the diverse political affiliations among its members. Political spending accounted for 17.3% of the AFT’s total outlays in the 2021-22 fiscal year. AFT President Randi Weingarten pulls in roughly $488,000 a year—more than eight times what a teacher makes.


The situation is arguably worse at the even larger National Education Association. It spent $49.2 million on political activities in 2021-22, surpassing the amount spent on membership representation by $3.5 million. Like the AFT, the NEA protected revenue from membership losses by hiking dues. The union’s emphasis on financial investment further highlights its shift away from representing teachers and toward building its own wealth.

Michigan Repeals Right to Work Law

 Nick Niedzwiadek at Politico:

In a major victory for labor unions, Michigan on Friday became the first state in more than half a century to repeal a right-to-work law.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, overturning a 2012 GOP law that allowed workers to choose not to join unions or pay union dues as a condition of employment, even if the union represents them in negotiations.

...

The anti-union law’s repeal is a particularly significant symbolic victory given the special place Michigan holds in the organized labor movement.

“For us, being the home of labor and getting attacked 10 years ago was a gut punch to workers across Michigan,” state Sen. Darrin Camilleri, the sponsor of MI SB34 (23R), told POLITICO. “We are a state so steeped in union activism and union history that we knew this was a policy that our constituents wanted for the last 10 years as well.”

Even with the move, more than half the states in the country have right-to-work laws on the books. The Michigan Legislature’s repeal is the first since Indiana did so in 1965, before reverting in 2012. (Missouri voters in 2018 blocked a right-to-work law passed by Republican lawmakers.)

Unions, Policy Advocacy, and Public Relations

IZA Institute of Labor Economics DP No. 16014: 

Does Policy Advocacy Generate Good PR? Evidence from Labor Unions and Minimum Wages

Jeffrey Clemens, Michael R. Strain 

Abstract:

We develop new facts relating news coverage, interest groups, and events in the legislative histories of minimum wage increases. First, we create and validate a database of news articles that includes coverage of minimum wages and organized labor. Second, we show that policy changes predict increases in news coverage that connects organized labor and minimum wages, in particular when those articles reference high-profile interest groups and research output. Third, these policy events lead coverage of organized labor to shift towards articles about minimum wages. We observe that the minimum wage’s popularity with the public makes this shift qualify as “good PR,” an assessment that is supported by sentiment analysis of articles about organized labor. This public relations channel can thus help rationalize why interest groups engage in policy advocacy.

Corporations v. Unions

 Emily Peck at Axios:

Starbucks workers are struggling to clear the biggest hurdle when it comes to union organizing — negotiating their first contract.

Why it matters: Though surveys show that the public is increasingly pro-labor, big employers — even widely recognized brands like Starbucks, Amazon and Tesla — are not shy about aggressively fending off unionization.

Driving the news: It's been a busy week. Tesla was accused of firing 30 employees in Buffalo in retaliation for announcing a union campaign, according to a charge filed at the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday, first reported by Bloomberg.

• The NLRB ruled on Monday that Starbucks unfairly fired two organizers in Philadelphia and ordered that they be reinstated with back pay.
• “We disagree with the decision and are considering all options to obtain a full legal review of the matter,” a Starbucks spokesperson told Axios in an email, adding that the employees violated policies.
• The labor board has lodged 77 complaints against the company since 2019 for unfair practices, like illegally firing workers or threatening and intimidating them. That appears to be the most complaints filed by the board against a company in recent history.

Police Unions and Civilian Oversight

Organized labor in general has fallen on hard times.  But in many places, public-employee unions retain enormous power.

Jamiles Lartey at the Marhsall Project:

If you heard about a group called “Voters for Oversight and Police Accountability,” who would you guess is funding and coordinating its efforts? Progressive activists? Civic-minded community members?

How about a police union?

That’s the situation in Austin, Texas, where this fall, canvassers for “VOPA” appear to have amassed the 25,000 signatures needed to get a referendum on the so-called “Austin Police Oversight Act” into the city’s May 6 election.

The thing is, there was already an “Austin Police Oversight Act” on the ballot. The duplicate effort, funded by the Austin Police Association, is similar — but seriously watered down, when compared with the original promoted by the progressive political action committee Equity Action. That original proposal seeks to open up public access to police records, and give the city’s office of police oversight the ability to participate in investigations of officer conduct.

By contrast, the police union-funded ballot initiative would keep certain misconduct records hidden from the public and leave the board with a more passive role in investigations.

Reporting late last year found that the police union was running VOPA’s website, and this week, a reporter with the Austin Chronicle uncovered that the union had contributed virtually every penny of the nearly $300,000 raised for the campaign. The union did not respond to a request for comment from The Marshall Project, and has not responded to a request from the local Fox affiliate.

The effort appears to be a brazen version of something police unions have attempted in numerous cities recently: to derail and disempower civilian oversight groups tasked with monitoring and reviewing police conduct.

Lowest Unionization Rate on Record

 From BLS:

The union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 10.1 percent in 2022, down from 10.3 percent in 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.3 million in 2022, increased by 273,000, or 1.9 percent, from 2021. However, the total number of wage and salary workers grew by 5.3 million (mostly among nonunion workers), or 3.9 percent. This disproportionately large increase in the number of total wage and salary employment compared with the increase in the number of union members led to a decrease in the union membership rate. The 2022 unionization rate (10.1 percent) is the lowest on record. In 1983, the first year where comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

... 

In 2022, 7.1 million employees in the public sector belonged to unions, about the same as in the private sector (7.2 million). (See table 3.)

Union membership was little changed over the year (+80,000) in the public sector, after a decline the prior year (-191,000). The public-sector union membership rate continued to decline in 2022; the rate went down by 0.8 percentage point to 33.1 percent. In 2022, the union membership rate continued to be highest in local government (38.8 percent), which employs many workers in heavily unionized occupations, such as police officers, firefighters, and teachers.

The number of union workers employed in the private sector increased by 193,000 to 7.2 million over the year. The private-sector unionization rate edged down by 0.1 percentage point in 2022 to 6.0 percent. Industries with high unionization rates included utilities (19.6 percent), motion pictures and sound recording industries (17.3 percent), and transportation and warehousing (14.5 percent). Low unionization rates occurred in insurance (1.2 percent), finance (1.3 percent), professional and technical services (1.3 percent), and food services and drinking places (1.4 percent).

 

Support for Unions

 Jake Rosenfeld at WP:

Gallup polls have been surveying Americans’ attitudes toward labor unions for nearly 90 years. Last week, the most recent Gallup survey found that union support was higher than it has been since the mid-1960s. Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of respondents said they approved of labor unions.

Why?

Nearly three decades ago, a pair of researchers used statistical techniques to analyze decades of union approval polling. They wanted to find out why union support changed over time. Like previous research, they discovered that the state of the economy mattered. Specifically, Americans soured on unions when there was high unemployment — and were more supportive of unions when labor markets were tight.

The survey evidence suggests that this may still be true. Gallup surveys show a dramatic dip in union support between 2009 and 2012 — the last sustained period of high unemployment in the United States. Indeed, in 2009 support for organized labor fell below 50 percent for the first and only time in the Gallup series.

...

People are more likely to think unions are valuable when inequality seems high. Even in 2012, when overall support for organized labor was much lower than today, a strong majority agreed that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person,” according to a Pew poll. People see unions as a counterweight to corporate power, fighting on behalf of average workers. Recent scholarship suggests local context matters: Rising economic inequality in one’s Zip code corresponds with greater support for labor unions. As the percentage of wealthy residents in one neighborhood climbs, so too does support for strengthening union

So why have unions gotten so much weaker?

Research points to the interrelated forces of automation, offshoring, and employer and political opposition as the key reasons the labor movement is weaker than it has been for a century. These underlying factors suggest rising popularity alone will not transform the fortunes of organized labor.

Union Membership in 2021

 From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2021, the number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions continued to decline (-241,000) to 14.0 million, and the percent who were members of unions--the union membership rate--was 10.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The rate is down from 10.8 percent in 2020--when the rate increased due to a disproportionately large decline in the total number of nonunion workers compared with the decline in the number of union members. The 2021 unionization rate is the same as the 2019 rate of 10.3 percent. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent and there were 17.7 million union workers.

Highlights from the 2021 data: 

• --The union membership rate of public-sector workers (33.9 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than the rate of private-sector workers (6.1 percent). (See table 3.) 

• --The highest unionization rates were among workers in education, training, and library occupations (34.6 percent) and protective service occupations (33.3 percent). (See table 3.)

• --Men continued to have a higher union membership rate (10.6 percent) than women (9.9 percent). The gap between union membership rates for men and women has narrowed considerably since 1983 (the earliest year for which comparable data are available), when rates for men and women were 24.7 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively. (See table 1.)

• --Black workers remained more likely to be union members than White, Asian, or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.) -

• -Nonunion workers had median weekly earnings that were 83 percent of earnings for workers who were union members ($975 versus $1,169). (The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.) (See table 2.)

• --Among states, Hawaii and New York continued to have the highest union membership rates (22.4 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively), while South Carolina and North Carolina continued to have the lowest (1.7 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively). (See table 5.)

 

Union Approval

 Megan Brenan at Gallup:

 Sixty-eight percent of Americans approve of labor unions. Though statistically similar to last year's 65%, the current reading is the highest Gallup has measured since 71% in 1965.

Gallup has measured the public's rating of labor unions periodically beginning in 1936 and then annually since 2001, and more Americans have expressed approval than disapproval in every reading.

Between 1936 and 1967, approval averaged 68% and included record-high 75% approval ratings in 1953 and 1957. Then, from 1972 through 2016, support eased, with few readings over 60%. This included the 48% all-time low recorded in 2009, the only time approval was below the majority level. Since 2016, approval has steadily increased and is now 20 percentage points above the historical low.

...

Democrats are the most approving of unions. Their latest approval of 90% is the highest it has been in the past two decades and is up seven points since last year. At the same time, Republicans' (47%) and independents' (66%) approval is essentially unchanged. Each partisan group's current approval of unions is more than 20 points higher than its lowest 2001-2020 rating.

Opinion of Unions

 John Gramlich at Pew:

As Labor Day approaches, a narrow majority of Americans continue to say labor unions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the United States. Most Americans also say the long-term decrease in the percentage of workers represented by unions is bad for working people in the U.S., and for the country as a whole, according to recent Pew Research Center surveys.

As of July, 55% of U.S. adults say labor unions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, unchanged from August 2019, the last time the Center asked this question. While the overall figure has remained the same, Democrats have become more likely – and Republicans less likely – to say unions have a positive effect.

Around three-quarters of Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party (74%) now say labor unions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, up from 66% in August 2019. The share of Republicans and GOP leaners who say unions have a positive effect has fallen from 44% to 34% during that span. Democrats and Republicans have diverged in their views of several other institutions since 2019, too.

Special Interest California

Melody Gutierrez and Maloy Moore at LAT:

Facebook, Google and Blue Shield of California are among the companies that contributed $226 million to government causes on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s behalf last year, an unprecedented level of spending that is raising alarms about the influence large corporations are amassing in Sacramento.

State records reviewed by The Times show that so-called “behested payments” surged in 2020 compared with the year prior, when companies gifted $12.1 million on Newsom’s behalf. The governor’s haul last year during the COVID-19 pandemic was six times as much as that reported by former Gov. Jerry Brown during his final eight years in office combined.

With no limit on how much money can be donated by organizations or individuals at the behest of the governor, millions of dollars flowed in to prop up public services during the pandemic and fund Newsom’s favored programs, including an effort to address homelessness and a public safety campaign promoting the importance of wearing masks.

The corporations say they were simply trying to help the state in a time of need. But no matter how noble the cause, critics fear the donations could allow corporations to hold more sway in state government. They noted many of the donors have other business before the governor, received no-bid government contracts over the last year or were seeking favorable appointments on important state boards, which they say creates the appearance of a pay-to-play system.

Anita Chabria at LAT:

Despite weeks of street protests over the killing of George Floyd and California’s reputation for progressive politics, a series of major police reforms proposed in Sacramento largely fizzled in 2020.

Backers hoped to have more success in 2021, with the pandemic waning, legislators spending more time on the issue and momentum building to address inequities in policing.

But police reform is hitting hard times again this year, including a plan common in other states to oust bad cops.

Across the nation, 46 states have rules preventing abusive officers from jumping jobs, furthering their careers by switching agencies even after they’ve committed serious misconduct or been fired. California is not one of them — but a proposed law to change that is facing unexpectedly fierce opposition at the Capitol.

For seven tense hours Tuesday — one week after a former Minneapolis police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd — legislation to ban peace officers found to have acted with significant malfeasance in California seemed on the verge of dying in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill’s author, a Black man representing Gardena, had to promise to compromise on key provisions to keep it alive, even as he vented about the pushback he met on one of the proposal’s first steps through the legislative process.
...

SB 2’s toughest challenge may revolve around banning officers. Law enforcement unions are adamant that those provisions are unfair and may run afoul of rights guaranteed by contracts and law. Multiple law enforcement organizations and chiefs of police called in during testimony said they supported a decertification process but not the one suggested by SB 2.

Also see "How Police Unions Fight Reform," The New Yorker, July 27, 2020.