Newsom Signs Bill to Expand California Labor Commission Oversight of Employer Disputes, Union Elections
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Tuesday in response to the Trump administration’s obstacles to federal regulators that significantly expanded California’s power in workplace disputes and union elections.
Bill 288 gives state government phases and oversees coalition elections, allegations of workplace retaliation and other disputes between private employers and workers if the National Labor and Industrial Relations Commission fails to respond.
When Newsom signed the Workers’ Rights Act, his office contrasted with the impasse in Washington, D.C. and the government shut down.
“With the federal government not only falling asleep on the steering wheel, but driving into incoming traffic, it’s more important than the various countries standing up to protect workers,” Newsom said in a statement. “California is a proud working nation – we will continue to work to keep our country running and the workers thriving in the economy.”
The NLRB’s mission is to maintain the rights of private employees to union or organization in other ways to improve their working conditions, and it has been functionally paralyzed since when Trump fired a board member in January.
The Trump administration also proposed a total cut to the agency’s staff and cancelled leases for regional offices in many states, while Amazon, SpaceX and others challenged the constitutional nature of the 90-year-old federal agency in court.
With this law, workers cannot get a timely response at the federal level and can ask the California Public Employment Relations Commission to enforce its rights.
The law creates a Public Employee Relations Commission Law Enforcement Fund, which is funded by civil penalties paid by cited employers who are paid for workforce violations to help pay for additional liability of the state labor commission.
“This is the most important labor law reform in nearly a century,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Trade Unions. “California workers will no longer be forced to rely on a failed federal agency to rely on when they are coalitions of the federal government.”
Depending on the language in the law, the state labor board can choose a case. These include allegations or election certification brought to the agency have been in trouble with the regional director for more than six months – or the federal board has no quorum of members or otherwise hindered.
The law could pose legal challenges to the bill’s infringement of federal law.
This was opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce, which warned that the bill attempts to give California Labor Commission authorities even as the federal agency’s regional offices continue to deal with elections and allegations raised by workers and employers.
The Chamber argued: “The court has repeatedly ruled that states are prohibited from regulating this space.”
Catherine Fisk, Professor Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, but in the first decades of NLRB operation, state labor agencies had more room for enforcement of federal labor rights.
The law, she said, “simply proposes to return to the system that has been in the past thirty years.”
Tina McKinnor (D-Hawthorne), the author of the bill, said the bill would ensure that California workers can continue union and bargaining.
“The current president is trying to bring the ball of destruction to the basic right of public and private sector employees to join the union,” McInno said in a statement. “This is unacceptable, frankly, non-Americans. California will not be idle because its workers are systematically denied the rights of the organization.”
