California will not stop taxing its citizens. The state slaps a 63-cent fee on every gallon of gas. Sales taxes exceed 10 percent in some cities. The state’s highest earners pay a double-digit marginal rate to Sacramento on top of what they owe the feds.
One group, more than any other, has cashed in on this arrangement: California’s public-sector unions. For them, higher taxes are good business. More taxes means more state workers, which means more union members, more dues, and more power for union bosses. The union bosses, in turn, keep the dollars flowing, agitating for more tax hikes, more spending, and more state workers.
How powerful are California’s public-sector unions? We pored over disclosure forms and crunched the numbers. It turns out that, in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024, ten of the largest California-based unions with public-sector members collected more than $1 billion in dues and fees.
Many of these unions spend at least some of their revenues on lobbying. State politicians, playing their part in the scheme, devote more taxpayer resources to the public sector, inching California toward the kind of soft socialism that its leaders have long desired—no armed revolution necessary.
This is California’s billion-dollar union machine.
Unions exist to represent their members’ interests. In the private sector, unions negotiate against a corporation, whose executives have skin in the game. In the public sector, by contrast, unions negotiate against the state, which is spending other people’s money. In California, public-sector unions have exploited this dynamic to create a feedback loop that has made them the most powerful machine in state politics.
We focused on ten of the largest California-based unions with public-sector members. Our list features key players in the state’s labor movement: the California Teachers Association (CTA); the California Nurses Association (CNA); the California School Employees Association (CSEA); and various International Union of Operating Engineers, SEIU, and AFSCME chapters. These groups raked in more than $1 billion in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024—and show little sign of slowing down.
Their size is astounding. The ten unions have more than 1 million members. They list more than 1,500 employees and officers who administer the unions, organize the workers, and more. The unions’ combined membership equates to at least 6 percent of the state’s 2024 presidential-election voters and at least 29 percent of the state’s 2024 Democratic primary voters—more than enough to sway a statewide contest.
Those members pay annual dues. Some of the unions, in turn, send money to Democrats. The successful campaign of the current assembly Speaker, Democrat Robert Rivas, received funds from the political-action arms of CNA and CSEA. California’s eight statewide officials—all Democrats—received a campaign donation from at least one of the ten unions’ PACs at some point in their careers.
Lobbying is another way that these unions can throw their weight around. The ten unions reported at least $29 million in political and lobbying expenditures in the calendar or fiscal year ending in 2024. Several unions employed an army of in-house “political organizers” who served the unions’ political interests, day in and day out.
The unions don’t have to spend much money to see a return on investment. In 2024, the California Teachers Association spent $2.1 million to lobby for a $10 billion school construction bond. It passed, and while the CTA doesn’t pocket the money, new schools mean more education funding for teacher and staff salaries and hiring—a win for the unions, at an estimated cost of $18 billion, after bond interest, to taxpayers.
State programs give unions a chance to expand their power. California’s $33 billion In-Home Supportive Services program, for example, pays caregivers—most of whom are family members—to aid the elderly and disabled. The state requires caregivers to attend an introductory training and, in at least one case, has allegedly permitted a union representative to join them. One of these unions allegedly locked IHSS workers in a room during orientation and “coerced” one of them to become a member.
Predictably, the two primary IHSS unions—SEIU 2015 and UDW—have seen massive windfalls as the program has expanded. Between them, the two unions collected $168 million in dues and fees in 2024.
The final leg of the unions’ feedback loop is agitating for new taxes. SEIU’s United Health Care Workers–West (UHW) sponsored Proposition 40, the so-called “billionaires tax,” which would levy a 5 percent tax on the assets of all California billionaires. Most proceeds from the tax would flow to health care services, including Medi-Cal—a program that funds hospitals and other settings where UHW can harvest workers.
These unions are not content to run California politics. Their ideology impels them to colonize new territory; some believe that public workers are oppressed, while one, apparently, is focused on securing abortion rights. And some of California’s public-sector unions have bolstered progressive campaigns across the country, both directly and through their parent unions.
Take UHW. In 2024, the union sent $2.2 million to “Arizonans Fed Up With Failing Healthcare,” a left-wing group, which apparently shoveled the money to support Arizona’s successful 2024 ballot measure establishing a state constitutional right to abortion.
In 2024, California’s public-sector unions transferred millions of dollars to their parent labor organizations. Once that money enters the national accounts, the parent unions can deploy California money in whatever state they wish—potentially intervening in elections or lobbying for new legislation.
The unions’ national arms intervene in elections across the country. SEIU shuffled $75,000 to support New York Representative and current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and $85,000 to support South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn. AFSCME’s contributions during the 2024 election cycle reportedly exceeded $17 million.
These unions present themselves as defenders of the working class. City Journal’s investigation of their expenses, however, reveals that some have spent their revenues on tony hotels and consultants.
Take the California Nurses Association, which holes up at luxury resorts. The union reported spending some $446,000 across four luxury properties in 2024: $180,000 at the Hotel del Coronado; $70,000 at the Claremont in Berkeley; $131,000 at Toronto’s Four Seasons; and $65,000 at the oceanfront Seascape Beach Resort in Aptos. CNA classified these charges as “administration,” representation, or “overhead.”
SEIU 2015, which represents IHSS workers, is another example. IHSS workers earned an average of $17.95 an hour as of January 2024. The union’s leaders, by contrast, apparently enjoyed $618,719 spent at the oceanfront, four-diamond Laguna Cliffs Marriott Resort & Spa in Dana Point: $344,668 for executive-board meetings, $239,130 for managers’ retreats, and $34,921 for a growth-staff retreat—while many of its workers earn around minimum wage.
UNAC spent nearly $200,000 in “overhead” on three boutique coaching firms. One of those firms, Canyon Bridge Consulting, addresses, among other things, “reactive, abrasive, or alienating behaviors.” Another, UniqueSpeak, offers, among other services, personal branding advice, crisis communications, and presentation tips for “ESL speakers.” The third, PULP Coaching, markets leadership exercises such as snowshoeing, sailing, surfing, and cave exploration.
The line items are vague, and we don’t know what exactly UNAC spent these dollars on. But the spending raises an obvious question: What are UNAC’s members getting for their money?
The bill for the union machine’s activities is coming due in Sacramento. California’s near-term budget balance depends on $20 billion in reserve withdrawals and suspended deposits and another $4 billion in borrowing. The Newsom administration projected a $14 billion structural deficit in 2026–27. The unions’ answer to every sign of fiscal limits is the same: find more revenue.
Consider the schools. California’s K–12 enrollment hit 6.3 million students in 2004–05. The 2025-26 count was 5,731,260—a 9 percent decline, even after adding some pupils through a new grade level, “transitional-kindergarten.” Rather than allow the system to contract with its student population, the CTA backed a measure that would make permanent a “temporary” tax hike, which would send billions to schools—even as enrollments decline.
The same ratchet operates in local government. Los Angeles County’s 2025 SEIU agreement added several bonuses and carried a potential cost approaching $2 billion, much of it expected from state and federal reimbursements. Even though a local union reached the agreement, taxpayers across the country are paying the cost.
Pensions carry these obligations decades into the future. California’s state and local retirement systems have more than $265 billion in estimated unfunded pension liabilities, according to the Reason Foundation. After the Great Recession, the City of Stockton maintained its pension-system obligations even after a federal judge ruled that it could reduce them. San Bernardino, which had gone bankrupt, agreed to repay missed contributions, plus interest and penalties while protecting earned pensions—even as the city went under. Pension promises survived even when everything else gave way.
Medi-Cal brings the doom loop into a single, massive statewide program. It covers nearly 15 million people, pays workers represented by UHW and other health-care unions, and costs local, state, and federal taxpayers nearly $220 billion. Now, facing the limits of existing taxpayer resources, UHW is advancing the Prop. 40 wealth tax to keep Medi-Cal—and the union machine—growing.
We contacted all ten of the unions included in our review. Only one, SEIU 1021, responded, and did so to defend high-dollar expenditures on its 2024 convention. “We book union hotels, hire union caterers, and produce the convention with union stagehands and technicians . . . and performers who support working people,” a spokesman said. “Paying union wages to union workers is not a scandal. It’s the job.”
California is approaching a tipping point. The population benefiting directly from government spending is poised to grow faster than the private economy expected to finance it. Medi-Cal alone covers more than one-third of Californians. Add government and nonprofit employees, workers in taxpayer-supported industries, and recipients of other benefits, and California’s state-dependent constituency approaches majority scale.
A voter asked to choose between fiscal restraint and a program supporting his job, health coverage, or pension is not deciding an abstract policy question. He is deciding whether to cut his own income. The unions exist to organize that self-interest, discipline it, and turn it out at election time. The politicians impose higher taxes, which drive away many residents and businesses that pay more than they consume, leaving a larger burden for those who remain—and another argument for a federal bailout, “alimony” from ex-California residents, or a new tax hike.
California’s unions built this power one payroll deduction, contract, training session, regulation, and ballot measure at a time. Private enterprise has no comparable permanent organization. The union machine needs to win only periodically to lock in for good another program, tax, employment category, or spending commitment, with each victory unlocking more power and resources. On the other side, the machine’s opponents must mobilize and win every time just to keep what they already have.
The technology sector is California’s last private power center with the wealth and independence to resist the union machine. As the state’s own nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has reminded the public, California’s budget partly hinges on fortunes generated by Silicon Valley.
That’s why the wealth tax is the final wake-up call for California’s technology sector—the final power base the unions have not captured. Unless private-sector workers begin to vote, spend, and organize with the same discipline, California’s socialist revolution by other means will continue doing what it was designed to do: turn public money into political power, political power into still more public money, and replicate the model across the nation—with no end in sight.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp is an investigative reporter at City Journal.
Government Employee Unions should be illegal. FDR said that very firmly. But JFK opened the floodgates with an Executive Order after he was elected. Payback for their help during his campaign.
As I wrote in City Journal, allowing public sector unions was the greatest public policy mistake of the 20th century. Prohibition was repealed when the Great Depression made government desperate for money. But how do we get legislators to vote to rein in the public sector unions that bribe them so generously?