Why labor finally lost

California legislators may have discovered the only Sacramento special interest more sacrosanct than organized labor: themselves. Forced to decide whether to allow their own beleaguered staff to organize — the sort of question that almost invariably goes the unions’ way in a Democratic-ruled, labor-underwritten Legislature — a legislative committee last week gave organized labor something it doesn’t often get in Sacramento: an unqualified defeat.

Only two members of the Assembly Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security Committee voted for the measure by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego. Five — including Democrats Ken Cooley of Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County), Jim Cooper of Elk Grove (Sacramento County) and Patrick O’Donnell of Long Beach — either voted against it or failed to vote.

The legislation, AB2048, would have given legislative aides the organizing rights enjoyed by most other public and private employees in California. As a legislative analysis noted, lawmakers have granted such rights to employees of virtually every other kind of public entity: the state, cities and counties; public schools, colleges and universities; courts; and transit agencies. “Employees of the Legislature deserve the same right to collectively ... bargain for workplace protections with their employer that public employees in the state’s executive and

judicial branches enjoy,” Gonzalez Fletcher argued.

At-will employment is certainly standard among legislative staffs, but recent revelations of sexual harassment and worse in Sacramento have bolstered the rationale for union representation. As Gonzalez Fletcher put it, “The #MeToo movement has shed a spotlight on legislative employees’ lack of tangible workplace protections.”

Perhaps the most compelling case for the bill, however, was the Democratic majority’s history of boosting big labor at almost every turn. Last year alone, for instance, the Assembly passed union-backed bills to assist in organizing home health workers, impose staffing requirements on dialysis centers, and prohibit local government contracting for anything that might be done by a unionized public employee.

The Legislature’s philosophy of labor representation, in other words, is not so much #MeToo as #ExceptUs.