Posts tagged Jerry Brown

    Cesar Chavez’s Other Crimes

    March 23, 2026 // But long before this week's disturbing allegations came to light, Reason investigated a "network of nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations set up and run by Chavez and other UFW officials" that managed to pull in millions of taxpayer dollars while refusing virtually all requests for transparency and traditional accounting. The 1979 cover story "Who's Bankrolling the UFW?" stood apart from the widespread canonization of Cesar Chavez as a secular saint whose supporters "fought tearfully through…crowds for a chance to shake his hand or just touch him on the shoulder."

    How YIMBYs won over unions in California

    August 22, 2023 // The Trades acknowledges there’s a shortage of workers for California’s needed residential construction, and they know their existing unionized workforce is getting older. A union-backed study from 2019 stipulated that to meet the state’s affordable housing goals, California would need to recruit at least 200,000 new workers. But the Trades insist things are not so dire yet that leaders need to abandon “skilled and trained” requirements, and they say more people will be incentivized to become “skilled and trained” only if lawmakers guarantee good union jobs waiting on the other end of an apprenticeship. About 70,500 people have graduated from these apprenticeships between 2010 and 2022, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations. In the end, California lawmakers didn’t really have to make a choice, and ended up passing Wicks’ bill, along with another similar bill that included the Trades’ preferred “skilled and trained” language. For now, developers basically can choose which law they want to follow if they want to convert strip malls to housing. (Yes, really.) “AB2011 was a huge victory, but they allowed the building trades to save face by passing both bills,” said David, the YIMBY activist.