The Abridged version:
- California’s public employment board will not grant the state’s request to block state workers’ planned Wednesday strike, the board’s chief lawyer confirmed.
- The Newsom administration asked the labor board last week to seek an injunction halting the strike.
- On Friday, the board said it would not, if the union confirmed which essential workers would be exempted. The union says it has done so.
California’s public employment board will not grant the Newsom administration’s request to bar state workers from striking next week, the board’s lawyer confirmed.
On Friday, the Public Employment Relations Board’s top lawyer told attorneys for the administration and for Service Employees International Union Local 1000 that the board would not agree to halting the strike — if the union confirmed which health and safety workers would be exempted from participating, according to a letter from the board’s lawyer.
On Friday afternoon, Local 1000 sent the board the assurances it had asked for, union spokesperson Amber Rich said.
The local, which represents nearly 100,000 workers across multiple California agencies, plans to hold a one-day unfair practice strike on Wednesday.
Last week, CalHR, the state’s human resources department which bargains with state worker unions on the administration’s behalf, filed an unfair practice charge asking the labor board to halt the strike. Local 1000 filed its own charge in response.
The strike was planned in response to yet another unfair practice charge, which the union filed against the Newsom administration in July. That charge claimed the administration delayed negotiations over union members’ next contract and rejected multiple of the union’s proposals at once, among other accusations.
In Friday’s letter, Joe Eckhart, interim general counsel, said the board found that the administration is correct that workers it had identified in its unfair practice charge, including nurses, counselors and many others, are essential to Californian’s health and safety.
But Local 1000 has already identified which essential employees would be exempted from the strike, Eckhart said.
Therefore, if Local 1000 agreed in writing by 2 p.m. Friday to excuse those employees from the labor action, the labor board will not halt the strike, he said.
“We did respond by the 2 p.m. deadline, and we agreed to the stipulations outlined,” Rich said.
In Friday’s letter, the board also found that “the State has been unable to provide accurate information regarding the number of available replacement workers,” Eckhart said in the letter.
The board asked the Newsom administration to take several steps to address this, including to “continue to seek as many replacement workers as possible” and use them as much as possible to minimize the number of Local 1000 employees required to work during the strike, the letter shows.
Responding to the labor board’s decision against stopping the strike, CalHR’s deputy director of communications, Angela Musallam, said the department is “committed to maintaining state operations and critical public services during the planned strike and is coordinating with SEIU Local 1000 and state departments to ensure all necessary preparations are in place.”
“We do care about the safety of folks, the health and public safety, and so we are committed to honoring that and making sure that no one is … at risk,” Local 1000’s Chief Negotiator Bobby Dalton Roy said Friday.
Correction: Angela Musallam’s title was corrected to deputy director of communications at CalHR. This article was updated at 3:03 p.m. Oct. 16.
