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Who really runs California?
Most people would answer the same way. Voters elect a governor, legislators, county supervisors, city council members, and school boards, and those officials debate policy, pass laws, negotiate budgets, and make the decisions that shape life across the state.
But anyone who has spent years watching politics in Sacramento and city halls across California knows there is another layer of influence, one that rarely gets the attention it deserves.
The state’s public employee unions have become among the most powerful political institutions in California, and their reach extends well beyond negotiating wages, pensions, and working conditions.
They help elect the officials with whom they then negotiate. They spend extraordinary sums to influence elections and ballot measures. They lobby legislation and shape regulatory policy.
These unions occupy a position unlike almost any other organized interest in American politics. Businesses negotiate with the government. Environmental organizations lobby it. Taxpayer groups try to influence it.
Public employee unions do something fundamentally different: They negotiate directly with the officials whose campaigns they often helped finance and whose elections they often helped win.
Nothing like that exists in the private sector, where unions know they operate within limits set by the market. Every dollar for wages or benefits comes from a company that must stay profitable to survive. If labor costs become too high, the business will loses customers, relocate, or fail.
In the public sector, unions behave as if constraints don’t exist. That’s because when labor costs rise, the government can raise taxes, cut services, borrow, or defer the costs.
In the private sector, business executives and union leaders are on opposite, independent sides of the table. The United Auto Workers does not elect the CEO of Ford.
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In California, by contrast, public employee unions are often among the most influential forces determining who becomes governor, mayor, county supervisor, or school board trustee. They endorse candidates, contribute millions, and provide the volunteers and infrastructure many candidates could not easily replace.
By the time contract negotiations begin, the two sides have often worked together for years. That does not mean officials surrender; many negotiate in good faith to protect taxpayers while fairly compensating employees. But the officials who approve compensation packages are frequently backed by the same organizations representing the employees who benefit. The unions are on both sides of the table.
This is not an argument that public employees are the problem. California depends on dedicated teachers, firefighters, police officers, nurses, and thousands of other public servants, most simply trying to support their families and earn the benefits they were promised.
The focus here is not the individuals. It is the political organizations that represent them — and over the past half-century, those organizations have built one of the most effective and durable political machines in California history.
The question is no longer why public employee unions have influence. It whether California can survive their stranglehold on state politics.
Building the machine
California’s public employee unions did not become powerful overnight. Their influence was built over decades, through legislative decisions, political victories, and institutional change.
The modern era began in 1968, when Repulblican Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, granting collective bargaining rights to local government employees.
Seven years later, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Rodda Act, extending those rights to K-14 public school employees, and later the Dills Act, doing the same for state employees.
Together, these laws transformed public-sector labor relations across California and laid the legal foundation for one of the nation’s most powerful political movements.
None guaranteed dominance; they simply gave organized labor a framework from which to grow. As membership grew, so did dues, and dues paid for political operations that helped elect candidates sympathetic to labor. Those officials negotiated the contracts, passed the laws, and wrote the regulations, and each success brought more members, money, and influence.
The cycle reinforced itself. Over time, candidates were no longer simply endorsed by public employee unions; many came directly from the labor movement itself.
Another pivotal moment arrived in 1999, when Gray Davis signed Senate Bill 400, expanding state pension benefits — a decision whose consequences, explored later, reflected a governing philosophy that rewarded benefits today while pushing the cost into the future.
By the end of the 20th century, California’s public employee unions had evolved into permanent, and incredibly effective, political institutions. It happened because each victory made the next one easier. That is how institutions accumulate power.
Follow the money
Political influence is measured not by how often you get your way, but by whether government can realistically move forward without you.
By that measure, California’s public employee unions are among the most influential organizations in state politics — and that influence is neither hidden nor speculative. It is documented in campaign finance reports filed with the Fair Political Practices Commission.
When the FPPC examined a decade of campaign and lobbying reports, from 2000 through 2009, it found that the California Teachers Association alone had spent more than $211 million on California politics — more than any corporation, trade association, environmental group, or ideological organization in the state. No one else came close. The second-biggest spender of the decade was another public employee union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
That money buys far more than advertising. It finances candidate recruitment, independent expenditures, ballot measure committees, voter outreach, polling, and year-round lobbying.
These unions do not become active only a few months before an election; their influence is felt every day the legislature is in session and every time a school board meets. And the CTA is hardly alone. The SEIU, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the California Professional Firefighters, and others spend tens of millions of dollars more every cycle.
Money by itself does not guarantee success; California is full of wealthy interests that spend enormous sums only to lose.
What distinguishes public employee unions is that their spending is only one part of a broader operation. They also provide precinct walkers, phone banks, voter registration drives, and policy expertise most candidates could never build on their own, and their relationships with officials begin long before an election and continue long after.
The result is not merely influence, but also infrastructure — and it extends well beyond Sacramento, into county, city council, mayoral, school board, and special district races that draw little attention yet determine who will later negotiate labor agreements, approve pensions, and adopt budgets.
Money alone did not build California’s public employee union movement, but it helped build the machine that sustains it.
How influence becomes policy
Political power matters only if it changes outcomes. The examples that follow illustrate how influence becomes policy — and why so many Californians have come to believe organized interests carry more weight than the taxpayers who finance government.
When California closed its schools
Perhaps no recent event better illustrates that influence than the closure — and reopening — of the state’s public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. The early weeks were filled with uncertainty, and reasonable people can disagree about choices made with limited information. But one fact is beyond dispute: When California’s leaders weighed whether to close schools, the CTA was not merely another stakeholder. It was one of the few organizations whose position could fundamentally shape the outcome.
On March 13, 2020, as the CTA publicly urged closing every public school in the state, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order guaranteeing that districts would keep receiving state funding even if classrooms closed. As the pandemic wore on, the union stayed deeply involved in the debate over when and how schools should reopen. California’s classrooms stayed closed longer than most of the nation’s, while millions of parents watched from the sidelines.
I did not experience those shutdowns only as a political professional. I experienced them as a parent whose school-aged children paid the price. I had spent more than three decades around the CTA’s power and thought I understood it. That year taught me I had understated it.
The union’s reach was not confined to pay and benefits. It extended to whether my children went to school at all — and to the laws governing their classrooms, including the union’s long, successful fight to keep individual student outcomes out of teacher evaluations.
Whether every position it took was right is not the point. The point is that no governor could realistically make decisions affecting nearly 6 million public school students without accounting for one of the state’s most powerful organizations.
That is not influence over a labor contract. It is influence over statewide policy affecting virtually every California family — and it now reaches far beyond education.
When government can’t afford to say “no”
The same dynamic plays out far from Sacramento. In 2026, two of California’s most prominent urban school districts — Los Angeles Unified and San Francisco Unified — offered similar case studies. Both faced declining enrollment, warned of long-term fiscal strain, and knew temporary federal COVID relief was ending. Yet both approved labor agreements increasing long-term obligations.
In Los Angeles, officials priced the union’s proposals at more than $4 billion over three years — even as enrollment fell, federal funding disappeared, and the district faced abuse allegations and costly judgments. In San Francisco, under state fiscal oversight since 2024, leaders argued they could not responsibly afford the increases demanded, and a four-day teachers’ strike followed.
Again, the point is not that teachers are overpaid or undeserving of raises. It is whether elected officials can realistically refuse demands they believe exceed what taxpayers can sustain, knowing their reelection rests in the hands of the very unions across the table.
Increasingly, the answer appears to be no. When “yes” is politically easier than “no,” long-term realities become secondary. The costs do not disappear. They are pushed into the future.
The governor’s pen
The clearest example of influence may not be a law that passed, but one that almost certainly never will. In 2025, Congress created a federal tax-credit scholarship program, effective in 2027, letting states expand educational options through privately funded scholarships supported by federally tax-credited donations. The program requires no additional state education funds, and the governor can authorize participation with the stroke of a pen.
Newsom almost certainly will not, and the reason has little to do with administrative complexity. California’s leadership has long opposed virtually every significant school-choice proposal — vouchers, education savings accounts, scholarship tax credits — and no organization has fought those efforts more consistently than the CTA.
Whether school choice is good policy is not the point. What matters is that when a governor has unilateral authority to expand educational opportunity without new state spending, yet the proposal remains politically untouchable, it reveals the extraordinary influence one organized interest can exercise over the choices available to millions of families.
Taken individually, each example can be debated. Viewed together, they reveal a governing system in which one organized interest has become deeply embedded in the institutions that make public policy. And these are just a handful; there are enough to fill books. The question is no longer whether public employee unions have influence. It is whether that influence is consistent with democracy, and fiscal reality.
The incentives
These examples are not isolated events. Similar outcomes recur — on pensions, labor law, education policy, staffing, government spending — because the system’s incentives all point in the same direction.
This is not a story about villains. Union leaders are expected to fight for better wages and benefits for their members; politicians seek reelection and welcome the endorsements, volunteers, and money influential organizations provide. Each objective is rational on its own. The problem arises when all those incentives reinforce one another.
No issue illustrates that more clearly than the pension system. Unlike salaries, pension promises do not have to be fully paid for when negotiated: Benefits are earned today, but much of the cost is deferred for years or decades. That makes them uniquely attractive politically. Employees receive enhanced benefits, union leaders claim a victory, and officials celebrate a deal — while much of the burden goes unfelt until long after the negotiations end.
California’s modern pension challenge developed over decades, through decisions and financial assumptions that shifted today’s costs into tomorrow’s budgets. Supporters of Gray Davis’s benefit expansion argued that robust investment returns would provide the funding; critics warned that if those assumptions proved too optimistic, taxpayers would bear the difference. History has largely validated the critics.
I saw those incentives up close. I spent years handling media relations for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and it never stopped astounding me: Able-bodied deputies retiring at 50, because SB 400 and the local enhancements it inspired had made retirement that lucrative, then going to work for another agency or a private security firm because collecting a pension and a paycheck at once made economic sense. None of them broke any rules. They responded to incentives.
The numbers tell the story. When SB 400 passed, the state’s annual payment to CalPERS was about $160 million. Two decades later, it exceeded $7 billion.
Every dollar devoted to yesterday’s promises is one less for today’s services. Stockton learned that arithmetic the hard way, filing in 2012 for what was then the largest city bankruptcy in American history, having already cut roughly a quarter of its police force while retirement costs climbed. Vallejo and San Bernardino told similar stories.
One of the least understood numbers in California government is the assumed rate of investment return used by CalPERS. It sounds obscure, but it directly determines how much governments must contribute each year. Higher assumed returns reduce today’s required contributions, freeing money for more union jobs, raises, and richer benefits; lower assumed returns require governments to contribute more immediately.
No one is manipulating the figures — trustees have fiduciary duties and must judge long-term performance. But the structure creates unmistakable incentives, because lower contributions make it easier to balance budgets and avoid hard choices today. If future returns disappoint, the added costs do not disappear. They transfer to future officeholders and taxpayers.
The pattern extends beyond pensions. The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME was widely expected to weaken public employee unions by ending the requirement that nonmembers pay agency fees.
Yet it did not alter California’s landscape. Unions lost an estimated $50 million a year in agency-fee revenue, but membership largely held, and the legislature made it easier for unions to reach new employees. By the time Janus was decided, they had already built something more durable than a dues-collection system: Campaign organizations, lobbying operations, long-standing relationships, and networks developed over decades. Losing one legal advantage did not erase that infrastructure.
Even when reform passes, the system absorbs it. Gov. Brown signed a statewide pension overhaul in 2012, but it applied mainly to newly hired employees, and left the underlying bargaining structure untouched.
Wisconsin shows what happens when the structure itself changes: After that state restricted collective bargaining for most public employees in 2011, public-sector union membership fell by more than half within a few years, and much of the unions’ political influence went with it.
California’s machine is built on California’s rules.
That helps explain why meaningful reform has proven so hard. Every participant pursues rational objectives, but together they point the same way: more government employment, greater compensation, larger obligations, more influence.
The loop reinforces itself. Reform is not impossible, but it is extraordinarily difficult, because it asks elected officials to challenge organizations that helped elect them. The immediate costs are obvious; the benefits, if they come, are realized years later by someone else.
This requires no belief in conspiracy theories — only recognizing that institutions respond to incentives.
A warning ignored
In August 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt — architect of the New Deal and the best friend organized labor ever had in the White House — wrote to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees.
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” he warned. It has, he continued, “distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.” The reason was simple: In government, the employer is the whole people.
Roosevelt saw the problem before California signed its first public employee contract. The union model was built for a contest between labor and capital, with the market as referee. Transplant it into government and there is no referee. There are only politicians — elected, as often as not, with the help of the organizations sitting across the table.
California set that warning aside in 1968, and this essay has traced what followed. None of it was improper. The unions organized. They raised money. They recruited candidates. They won elections. It was the predictable result of disciplined political engagement sustained over decades — and it produced exactly the system Roosevelt predicted.
So I will end with a conclusion I once would have considered unthinkable: The public good may be better served by repealing the laws that allow government workers to unionize at all.
I know how that sounds. But it was the mainstream American view for most of the 20th century, and it was Roosevelt’s. The alternative is on display all around us. Left unchecked, these unions will keep doing what they do — growing their size, their scope, and their claim on the public treasury beyond anything reasonable. Nothing inside the system has any reason to stop.
Public employees deserve fair treatment. Taxpayers deserve a government that answers first to them. Yet taxpayers are not a permanent political organization. They collect no dues, maintain no year-round campaign, and station no lobbyist at every hearing in Sacramento.
Repeal may prove politically impossible; Wisconsin showed that even a partial rollback takes a political war. But whether the answer is repeal, reform, or simple restraint, the first step will not come from within. Closed loops do not open themselves.
If the balance is ever restored, the pressure will have to come from the only participants outside the loop: the voters who choose the government at the beginning of the chain and pay its bills at the end.
Nearly 90 years ago, Franklin Roosevelt told us this system could not work. California has spent the last half-century proving him right.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.
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