Sisters and Brothers,

California is defying national and historic trends, as the percentage of the workforce that is unionized increased last year. Despite broken labor laws and corporate union busting, California had 99,000 new union workers last year. Let’s keep organizing!

Congratulations to the 1500 workers at Sharp Grossmont, our newest brothers and sisters who organized and won a union with UHW last week. We love to see working Californians standing up and demanding their employers recognize their collective strength. As a side note… we know unionism runs in families. This was a heart-warming post by the son of a Local 229 Ironworker who was one of the worker organizers.

Our 2022 Scorecard is out! How did your legislators do? We had 8 Assemblymembers and 7 Senators who proved themselves to be Labor Champions, scoring a 100% on our collective labor scorecard.  We will be honoring those who received 100% scores at the Monday, May 8th dinner of our Unionize California Legislative Conference. You can join us by registering here.

Speaking of our Legislative Conference, we are kicking off the pre-Conference festivities on May 7th with a special salon with our US Senate Candidates. We expect this to be an open seat in 2024 and we will consider an endorsement at the end of the year Pre-Primary Convention. We are lucky to have 3 labor champions who have stated they intend to run: Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congresswoman Katie Porter and Congressman Adam Schiff are all expected to attend our conversation with the candidates on Sunday evening. Don’t forget to register!

It was a Teamster truck extravaganza at the Capitol last week. We unveiled our California Labor Federation sponsored bill, AB 316, to require any heavy duty autonomous vehicle to have a human operator on board. This commonsense legislation is important for road safety and to maintain good jobs in the industry. We unveiled a bi-partisan group of co-authors from up and down the state. You can see some amazing testimony here.

In Solidarity,

Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher