Gavin Newsom’s mind-boggling record of giveaways to unions

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Key points

• Roughly 100, 000 SEIU Local 1000 employees received 3% general raises in 2023, 2024 and 2025, along with numerous special salary adjustments and extra benefits.
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• Shortly after taking office, Newsom signed AB 1505 and AB 1507, strengthening traditional school districts' power over charter schools.
• In 2022, the California Labor Federation offered Newsom an 88% rating on its legislative priorities.
• Beginning next year, the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will provide taxpayers up to a $1, 700 federal tax credit for contributions to scholarship organizations.

For context, a friend lately informed me he was impressed that Gov. Gavin Newsom was standing up to California's public employee unions by requiring state workers to return to the office at least four days a week.

But if he thought that meant Newsom had generally been tough on California's powerful unions, I informed him there was a lot more to the story – and he was concerning to obtain a lesson in seven years of union favors he wouldn't forget. Start with the California Teachers Association.

Shortly after taking office, Newsom signed AB 1505 and AB 1507, strengthening traditional school districts' power over charter schools. CTA called it a "historic win after 27 years." Sign up for the California Morning Report newsletter.

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As schools around the country reopened, California's teachers unions continued demanding extraordinary conditions before returning to classrooms. Newsom spent months unwilling to seriously confront them while California children remained home.

By the time Newsom and the unions came to terms, California was among the last states in the country to fully reopen its public schools.

Beginning next year, the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit will provide taxpayers up to a $1, 700 federal tax credit for contributions to scholarship organizations. States must opt in. As of this month, 29 states have elected to participate.

California isn't one of them – a win for the CTA. It opposes directing scholarship dollars toward private-school alternatives to unionized public schools. Newsom still can opt us in. I wouldn't hold my breath.

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In 2023, Newsom negotiated contracts covering most of California's rank-and-file workforce estimated to cost taxpayers almost $5 billion over three years.

When California's budget challenges forced Newsom back to the bargaining table in 2025, SEIU still protected that final raise. While Newsom suspended their retiree health-care contributions and temporarily paused his return-to-office policy through July 1 of this year, workers accepted a temporary payroll reduction in exchange for extra leave.

Newsom additionally signed the Public Employee Health Protection Act, requiring administration employers to continue providing health insurance to public employees and their families while those employees are on an authorized strike.

So administration employees can stop working as they're striking against the administration – and taxpayers keep paying for their health insurance.

Newsom hasn't just rewarded existing union members. He has expanded organized labor's reach.

He offered roughly 40, 000 family child-care providers collective-bargaining rights with the state, expanded farmworker organizing, and last year created a path for more than 800, 000 California rideshare drivers to organize and collectively bargain. His generosity toward organized labor doesn't stop with public employees.

Newsom signed the disastrous 2019 assault on independent contracting that attempted to push enormous numbers of Californians into traditional employer-employee relationships – exactly the workforce model organized labor prefers.

Meanwhile, the backlash was immediate. Sacramento carved exemption after exemption into the law, and voters passed Proposition 22.

Newsom additionally signed major SEIU priorities establishing a $20 fast-food minimum wage and putting healthcare workers on a path toward $25 an hour.

This isn't a governor who occasionally happened to sign something unions liked. And the unions themselves keep score.

In 2022, the California Labor Federation offered Newsom an 88% rating on its legislative priorities. In 2025, it celebrated a "banner year" after Newsom signed all but one of its key priority bills.

Of course, I informed my friend, all of this matters even more as California is in the middle of a particularly real affordability crisis.

Richer administration contracts and expanded public employee benefits don't come from nowhere.

They land on taxpayers – the same taxpayers already staring down the nation's highest gas rates, some of the steepest home insurance increases in the country, and a cost of living that keeps pushing residents out of the state entirely.

Higher mandated labor costs work the same way in the private sector.

When Sacramento raises the wage floor for an entire industry or hands a new class of workers collective-bargaining leverage, those costs don't vanish – they show up in the cost of a burger, a rideshare, a hospital visit.

Californians pay either way: once as taxpayers, once as consumers. And they're paying both bills at exactly the moment they can least afford either one. What matters is the direction of the record. One fight doesn't erase seven years of history. After I finished, my friend paused. "Oh wow, " he remarked. "I guess Newsom sucks after all."

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.

Taken together, the developments around gavin Newsom's mind-boggling record of giveaways to unions point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.