Give Health Care Workers a Voice

The Health Care Union Transparency, Accountability & Union Member Right to Vote Act, aimed for California’s November ballot, is supported by health care workers, providers, and community leaders because it will provide health care workers much needed transparency and accountability over how their hard earned dues moneys are spent.

What It Does

Health care worker

Gives 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 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.

Provides health care workers more transparency and accountability by requiring large health care unions to provide their members 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.

That includes spending on ballot measures, PACs, candidates, elected officers or an elective office, independent expenditures, and payment to influence legislative or administrative action.

Applies to large health care unions with more than 50,000 members, where more than half of their members work for a health care provider.

Health care worker with patient

Why It's Needed

Health Care Workers Deserve a Say:

  • Right now, health care union members have little to no say on how their dues are spent on ballot measure campaigns and there is very little transparency or accountability.
  • Decisions are often made by a small group of union executives, not rank-and-file members. For one California health care union, decisions on where to spend money on politics are made by executives representing one quarter of one percent of their membership.
  • Labor unions have a right to spend money on political issues and measures. But union members also have the right to decide how their dues money is being spent and a right to know exactly where their hard-earned dues money is going.

Health Care Workers Should Know Where Their Money Goes:

  • Too often, health care union executives don’t disclose to their members exactly how they’ve spent their dues on political campaigns, ballot measures and political issues that threaten patients and health care workers.
  • 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 threaten the health care jobs of the very members they are supposed to represent.
  • Since 2012, the leader of one large California health care union alone has been behind 45 state and local ballot initiatives in California — spending more than $73 million of health care workers’ dues money to push unnecessary and risky initiatives, with most of them failing. That amounts to more than $700 per member.
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It's time to give health care workers the transparency and accountability they deserve, and the right to vote on how their hard-earned dues money is spent on ballot measure campaigns.

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