Donald Trump and his allies aren’t the only ones trying to overturn the results of an election they lost. In California, labor unions are attempting to do the exact same thing.
Democrats and unions took a major loss on Election Day in California last year. Aside from House Republicans picking up three seats in the Golden State, Democrats were handed loss after loss by voters in statewide referendums, including on affirmative action and rent control.
But the biggest losers were California’s unions, as voters overturned Democrats’ push to destroy the gig economy. The law was passed with companies like Uber and Lyft in mind, but it wreaked havoc on industries across the state. Everyone from truckers to freelance journalists was limited by the law. The state Legislature has already exempted 100 industries, and voters granted app-based companies such as Uber and DoorDash a blanket exemption.
Unions didn’t like that result, so now, they want it overturned. The Service Employees International Union announced its lawsuit earlier this month. Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the Democrat who wrote the atrocious law, recently said the proposition was unconstitutional and that it “doesn’t matter if it was a free election.”
It’s unconstitutional which means it doesn’t matter if it was a fair election. We’ve thrown out plenty of initiatives.
— Lorena Gonzalez (@LorenaSGonzalez) January 24, 2021
Unions are losing a lot of battles lately, and they keep turning to the courts to thwart the will of voters and workers alike. In December, three federal lawsuits were filed as Pennsylvania public employees detailed how the SEIU was continuing to deduct union dues from their paychecks in violation of the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME. Police unions were also in the spotlight, if only briefly, when police reforms were being discussed last summer.
Teachers unions have been the worst offenders. In the face of all evidence indicating that schools are not coronavirus hotbeds, teachers unions have held them closed. The Chicago Teachers Union is defying the Chicago Public Schools system and refusing to let schools return to in-person instruction. In Fairfax, Virginia, teachers got to jump to the front of the vaccine line, only for the union to announce they wouldn’t even return to in-person instruction in the fall.
It won’t get the panicked headlines Trump did, but the SEIU is fighting to overturn a free and fair election in which voters rejected the destructive law that it endorsed. It is an attack on the will of the voters. And it is increasingly par for the course for unions.
