Late last week, the CHA-sponsored initiative to give health care workers a voice in how their hard-earned dues money is spent on political campaigns qualified for the November 2026 ballot.
This initiative, spearheaded by a broad coalition — Californians for Health Care Workers’ Right to Vote — seeks to empower California’s health care workers. While health care workers who are part of large health care unions pay $1,800 per year or more, on average, in union dues, they are left in the dark with little say in how their dues are spent.
The Health Care Workers’ Right to Vote Act would do three powerful things:
- Provide health care workers with more transparency and accountability by requiring large health care unions to send a detailed account every year to their members clearly showing how their dues were spent on political campaigns.
- Give health care workers the right to vote on how their dues are spent on ballot measure campaigns by requiring large health care unions to obtain a vote of approval from their members in order to spend more than $1 million on a statewide ballot measure or more than $100,000 on a local ballot measure.
- Notify workers about how they can opt out of their money being spent for political purposes, should they choose to do so, empowering health care workers to not spend their hard-earned dues on political campaigns they don’t agree with.
In the past 15 years, a few large special interest health care union leaders have proposed dozens of cynical and unnecessary state and local ballot measures threatening patient access to quality health care at hospitals, health clinics, doctors’ offices, and other medical providers. These measures also jeopardize the health care jobs of the very members they are supposed to represent.
The bottom line: It’s time California’s health care workers had a clear picture of how their dues are being spent on political activities and the opportunity to weigh in on those decisions.
Last week’s formal qualification of this initiative is a key milestone toward making that goal a reality.
