Antonio Villaraigosa, elected Assembly speaker in 1998, was a union organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles before winning his Assembly seat.
Fabian Nunez, elected speaker in 2004, was political director of the Los Angeles County Federation of labor before winning his Assembly seat.
John Perez, who’s expected to take over as Assembly speaker next month, was political director for a United Food and Commercial Workers local before winning his Los Angeles County Assembly seat.
And Kevin de Leon, the man Perez nosed out earlier this month to get the nod for the speakership from the Democratic Assembly caucus? He was a staffer for the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association before winning his Los Angeles County Assembly seat.
Are you sensing a pattern here?
Perez, the man who will be speaker, told a classroom of public policy students a couple weeks back that even politicians who get elected with help from public employee unions have to remember they’re management representing California taxpayers when it comes time to negotiate contracts.
That’s a nice sentiment and absolutely true, but does anyone expect Perez to go along if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests slashing benefits for state workers or making deep cuts in the public workforce?
Former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who keeps a close eye on Democratic politics, doesn’t.
“Yes, new state Assembly John Perez is gay and Latino, but most of all he is pro-labor,’’ Brown said in his San Francisco Chronicle column last Sunday. “And that’s why he got the job.”
To be fair, when you talk about Perez being a pro-labor Democrat, it’s only a matter of degree. Unions have been a major power in Democratic politics for decades and you’d be hard-pressed to find any Democratic legislator who isn’t at least nominally a labor supporter.
And in these days of to-the-death partisanship, you won’t find many legislative Republicans with nice things to say about anyone in the labor movement.
But California is looking at a better than $20 billion shortfall in next year’s budget and pay and benefits for the state’s workforce – much of it represented by public employee unions — make up a major chunk of the state’s fixed costs.
There’s no way that budget gap gets closed without state workers taking a hit. And Perez, who’s spent 15 of his 40 years as a union organizer and official, will be in the middle of any budget discussions about state workers.
One of the reasons Perez got the speaker’s job was his reputation as a pragmatic legislator who can get along with both Republicans and Democrats.
“In my experiences working with him, I have found John to be both fair and insightful on the challenges facing our state,’’ Assemblyman Sam Blakeslee, the top Republican in the Assembly, said in a statement last week. “California’s ongoing budget and economic challenges will require close bipartisan collaboration.”
That “close bipartisan collaboration” has been missing in action in Sacramento in recent years, especially on the Assembly side. Perez makes absolutely no apologies for being a union man and, like Villaraigosa and Nunez before him, didn’t come to capital and become speaker to cut jobs, pay and benefits for union workers.
But no one is expecting anything but bad news when the new state budget is released next month and there are no easy ways to close the looming money gap. As the leader of the Assembly’s Democratic majority, Perez is going to find a lot of his longtime friends, including those in labor, aren’t going to be at all happy with any deficit reduction effort that targets their bailiwicks.
It’s a willingness to make the hard choices and support the least-bad alternatives that distinguishes a legislative leader in tough economic times. And Perez is going to face that test right away when he becomes speaker.
John Wildermuth is a longtime writer on California politics.