Earlier this week, the Californians for Health Care Workers’ Right to Vote campaign submitted nearly 1 million signatures to county elections offices to qualify the Health Care Union Transparency, Accountability & Union Member Right to Vote Act for California’s November ballot.
CHA’s ballot team has full confidence that these signatures will not only place the measure on November’s ballot but also are an indication of the near-universal popularity among voters to give health care workers a greater voice in how their hard-earned dues dollars are spent on political campaigns.
Your organization can lend its support to our efforts — sign up now through the campaign’s website.
It will take several weeks before the signatures are tallied, and the measure will then head to voters in the fall.
Right now, health care union members have little to no say in how their dues are spent. In fact, a few health care union executives in California have spent more than $150 million of their members’ dues on ballot measure campaigns in the last 15 years without getting approval from the very members that pay those dues.
This measure gives power back to the workers themselves, applying to large health care unions with more than 50,000 members, where more than half of their members work for a health care provider. When passed, the measure will:
- Give health care workers the right to vote on how their dues are spent on ballot measure campaigns. Large health care unions would be required to get a vote of approval directly from their members before they can spend more than $1 million on a statewide ballot measure or $100,000 or more on a local ballot measure.
- Add more transparency and accountability. Large health care unions would be required to provide their members with a detailed account of how their dues are spent on campaigns and politics every year — by mail and email — including the per-member cost of that political spending.
Labor unions have a right to spend money on political issues and measures. But union members also have a right to vote to decide how their dues money is spent and a right to know exactly where their hard-earned dues money is going.
