Efforts to give California’s health care workers a greater say in how their hard-earned dues dollars are spent are fully underway, with the filing last month of a statewide ballot initiative for the November 2026 election.
The initiative — The Health Care Union Transparency, Accountability & Union Member Right to Vote Act — is straightforward:
- It would empower union members by requiring a majority vote before large health care unions can spend more than $1 million on a single statewide ballot measure in a single year or more than $100,000 on a single local measure in a single year.
- It would foster transparency and accountability by requiring health care unions to show members how dues are spent on campaigns and politics every year — by mail and email.
- It would apply to large health care unions with more than 50,000 members, where more than half of their members work for a health care provider.
Signature-gathering to place the measure on the ballot will begin at the end of November, with a full-fledged, aggressive campaign to ensure its passage starting in 2026. This measure is necessary to ensure health care workers’ dues are used in a way that reflects their priorities — not the unchecked political agendas of some union leaders.
As a reminder, health care union members currently have little to no input or visibility into how their dues are spent on ballot measures and political campaigns. In the past 15 years, leaders of large special interest health care unions have cynically proposed dozens of state and local ballot measures that threatened patient access to quality health care at hospitals, health clinics, doctors’ offices, and other medical providers.
These measures also threatened health care jobs — those held by the very members the unions are supposed to represent and protect. Since 2012, the leader of one large California health care union alone has been behind 35 state and local ballot initiatives in California — spending more than $73 million of members’ dues money to push unnecessary initiatives, with most of them failing.
It’s time to end the abuse of the ballot system. It’s time to give workers a voice and a vote so their views are taken into account before political activities begin.
