Barbara Lee’s critics claim she will be beholden to city unions that are spending big to get her elected. Unions say their members need politicians who will champion working people’s interests.
by Natalie Orenstein and Eli Wolfe March 24, 2025 (Oaklandside.com)
The top two candidates for Oakland mayor in 2022 — Sheng Thao and Loren Taylor — spent $450,000 and $593,000 on their campaigns that year, money contributed by individuals and companies who wanted to see their preferred candidates in office.
Citywide campaigns are expensive, and Thao’s and Taylor’s sizable bank accounts enabled them to get the word out through mailers, advertisements and social media.
But Thao had extra support — lots of it. Coalitions of local and statewide labor unions independently spent almost $800,000 to support her candidacy. From nurses to electricians to firefighters, worker committees believed she would be the mayor to champion their interests, and they didn’t spare a cent helping her win.
In recent years, labor unions have played a prominent role in Oakland politics. Ahead of the April 15 special election, organized labor has coalesced around two candidates: Barbara Lee for mayor and Kara Murray-Badal for City Council District 2. One labor-backed committee supporting Lee has raised roughly $360,000. Unions have pumped $175,000 into a different independent expenditure supporting Murray-Badal.
Labor hasn’t spent much on the other top candidates in these races, although D2’s Charlene Wang has picked up endorsements from several unions.
Critics say organized labor has an outsize influence in Oakland elections, often spending more than any other single group on candidates who might later feel beholden to vote in their favor once they’re in office. In the coming months, the mayor and council will need to pass a budget including painful cuts to close an enormous deficit, and these observers worry the officials won’t feel free to lay off city workers or demand other concessions.
Unions argue that they represent huge swaths of working people in the city — tens of thousands of residents directly impacted by the decisions made by the powerful few who control Oakland’s budget and policies. They point out that real estate and other business interests also spend serious money in local elections — take the hedge fund executive who bankrolled Thao’s recall. And the politicians supported by labor reject the idea that their seats and votes are bought.
This level of labor spending is relatively new
Pat Kernighan, a former District 2 councilmember who’s endorsed Taylor for mayor, said 20 years ago, when she ran for office the first time, labor unions would contribute “relatively small amounts of money” to candidates and causes. Development in Oakland was heating up, and the real estate industry was making significant contributions, too. Kernighan said she watched labor’s spending grow larger and larger, especially when closely allied candidates like Nikki Fortunato Bas entered the fray.
“When it got completely outrageous is when they picked Sheng Thao to run for mayor,” she said.
It’s true unions spend heavily on local races these days — like their big buys in support of Thao in 2022. In the last election, in 2024, unions were outspent on the mayoral recall but still dropped major money to defend Thao: IFPTE Local 21 gave $20,000 and SEIU Local 1021 gave $50,000 to the anti-recall campaign. The Alameda Labor Council contributed $10,000. And they spent far more on other local races. Fix Our City, a committee supporting council candidate Carroll Fife and city attorney hopeful Ryan Richardson, received $225,000 from IFPTE, $65,000 from a committee funded by SEIU, and $75,000 from the labor council.
To understand the recent rise in union involvement in local politics, we have to go back to the Great Recession.
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Starting in 2008, Oakland, like other American cities, experienced a massive budget crisis as foreclosures across the United States skyrocketed, banks failed and the global financial system seized up. Over the next five years, the city cut 720 full-time jobs. Unions agreed to temporary 10% pay cuts and to contribute more to their retirement accounts. SEIU Local 1021 and IFPTE Local 21, which represent most city workers, agreed to the concessions. The Oakland police union didn’t, and in 2010 the city laid off 80 officers.
In years after that, city workers didn’t get significant pay raises. Mayor Libby Schaaf repeatedly pressed the city administration to freeze wage bumps, which heightened tensions between her and the unions.
Things came to a head in November 2017, when thousands of SEIU and IFPTE workers went on strike. Union officials complained that even as Oakland’s economy was on the upswing, the city was still “operating at 2008 staffing levels, with more than half of its workers part-time.” SEIU also attacked Schaaf by paying for billboards and online ads. The week-long strike shut down most of Oakland’s government, including libraries, daycare centers, senior centers, parks and recreation facilities and City Council meetings.
The strike ended after the unions eventually agreed to new contracts with modest wage increases of 6% over three years. Meanwhile, the cost of living in the Bay Area continued to rise.
The bitter dispute and the lost wages they’d endured were fresh in the minds of union leaders in 2022 when Schaaf was terming out of office. They threw their support behind Thao, who was facing off with Loren Taylor — then a councilmember allied with Schaaf. When the dust settled in 2022, unions got a mayor who promised to look out for their interests.
Another reason unions are spending more: sweeping changes to campaign finance laws. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case allowed anyone to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. The only catch was they could not give the money directly to candidates — they had to go through independent committees. The biggest spenders in state and national elections are wealthy individuals and corporations. But unions have also taken advantage of the change in the law, especially at the local municipal level where they have more strength.
Labor also plays a large role in Oakland Unified School District elections. In 2022, the Oakland Education Association, which represents local teachers, spent over $182,000 promoting school board candidates and another $19,000 campaigning for a parcel tax to fund school programs. In 2024, that committee raised more than $232,000.
School district elections also usually attract big bucks from private donors and groups supporting charter schools and “school choice” policies.
Big layoffs could be on the table in the next city budget
Labor’s influence in local races is receiving extra scrutiny this election because of what’s at stake in Oakland’s fiscal crisis
Oakland’s city administration took a bunch of steps over the last few months to close a shortfall in the current fiscal year, which ends in June. The city initially planned to lay off almost 100 workers and close up to six firehouses. The administration found money to reduce the number of layoffs and keep fire stations open.
But the city’s next budget starts on July 1, and it’s facing an even dicier situation. City staff anticipate Oakland will have a $265 million shortfall over the next two years unless the mayor and City Council make drastic changes. This could include more layoffs and cuts to police and fire.
Kernighan, the former councilmember, said she suspects that labor unions fear they’ll “come out on the losing end” of the budget crisis, and that’s why they’re spending lots on their preferred candidates.
“The question every voter should ask themselves is, why is this entity spending so much money and what do they want in return?” Kernighan said. “There are only two ways to reduce spending on personnel. One is layoffs and one is employees agreeing to concessions. Unions are aware of that and they don’t want to make concessions, which is understandable.”
For Seth Olyer, head of Oakland’s fire union, his calculation for who to support is simple: go with the person who will keep the fire department whole.
“We saw how devastating the two brownouts were that started on Jan. 6, and the one engine company that has been closed since November,” Olyer said. He added that OFD had a CPR call near a fire station on the very first day it closed. He believes Lee will help avoid future closures.
“Barbara Lee has sat with us consistently and has delivered for us over the decades,” Olyer said. He pointed to the $27.4 million grant OFD received in 2023 from FEMA to help with staffing. Olyer credits Lee with steering that money to Oakland.
Jobs are, of course, paramount to unions. The two budgets introduced by Thao made major cuts to departments, including freezing vacant positions, to balance deficits. But the former mayor avoided layoffs, which earned her praise from the unions that helped elect her.
Some unions that spend in Oakland elections, like the nurses and construction unions, don’t represent city employees. But their members are broadly affected by city policies and the overall economic health of Oakland.
With all the spending and campaigning by unions, and the scrutiny of their influence, what do the candidates say?
Lee has made it clear that when it comes to balancing the budget, she won’t consider firing people until other options have been exhausted.
“I’ve said and I’ll say again, I believe cutting jobs should be the last resort, but everything is on the table,” Lee said in a recent interview.
Taylor hasn’t explicitly spelled out his approach to layoffs. At a recent forum hosted by The Oaklandside, Taylor said the city needs to have an “honest” conversation with its labor partners about the budget.
Some of Lee’s critics have focused on the amount of money unions are pumping into the election to support her as evidence that the former congresswoman won’t make necessary sacrifices to right Oakland’s financial future.
“Barbara owes too many people, like the employee unions, to say no to them,” Brenda Harbin-Forte, a former Alameda County Superior Court judge, wrote in a post on X. Harbin-Forte, who helped lead the Thao recall, recently appeared in an ad attacking Lee that was sponsored by an independent expenditure committee.
Seneca Scott, another recall leader who worked for SEIU years ago before becoming a provocative activist, posted in February that “Lee will do whatever SEIU and the unions tell her to do, and that means Oakland will continue its march toward bankruptcy.” Scott has derided unions as part of an “NGO cabal complex” and even promoted a conspiracy theory claiming that unions are a “trojan horse” used by the Chinese Communist Party to “destroy America.”
We reached out to Lee’s campaign team last Monday requesting an interview for this story. After asking about the scope of our story, a spokesperson requested a list of questions. We provided several detailed questions that Lee did not respond to. Instead, her spokesperson provided a short statement that repeated some of Lee’s talking points about supporting working families.
Critics worry labor groups have too much sway over elections
Some skeptics of labor spending say their frustration stems not from the role of unions specifically, but from the fact that any single group can have such a loud voice in local politics.
If you — an individual person — want to donate directly to an Oakland campaign, you’re prohibited from spending more than $650. This cap is intended to ensure that no single wealthy person can “buy” a seat on the City Council. It’s meant to roughly complement the “one person, one vote” tenet of our democratic system.
But the Citizens United ruling provides a workaround. Independent expenditure committees (IEs) can raise or spend whatever they want in support of, or opposition to, a candidate. They can’t coordinate directly with the candidate, but if a committee wants to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from real estate developers, the restaurant industry or unions, and then spend it on its own advertisements promoting Joe Schmo for City Council 2025, it can do so legally.
“I don’t care who’s giving the money — it’s too much money,” said Kernighan about labor’s expenditures. “It’s so much money that it’s dwarfing the contributions of local residents and businesses and anybody else. That much money gives an unfair advantage to the person they’re promoting.”
Several years ago, Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission reported that in the city’s 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections, 92% of the local seats were “won by the candidate who received the most in contributions and/or had the most supporting independent expenditures.”
“No one special interest — including real estate developers or coal — should have control over city government,” said Gagan Biyani, digital director of Empower Oakland, a political advocacy group. Empower was founded in 2023 by Loren Taylor, but he stepped away from the group when he decided to run for office.
“Oakland is very much a town that respects and believes in unions and Empower feels the same way,” Biyani said. But “city government has to work for all people, including working-class people who are in unions and those who aren’t.”
Some political experts say the money that unions bring to elections isn’t the true source of their power in Oakland politics — it’s their ground game.
“That’s where people are misunderstanding the story: the real advantage these groups have is infrastructure,” said Todd David, the political director of advocacy group Abundance Oakland, which in the last election supported different candidates than those favored by local labor groups.
By infrastructure, David means all the mechanisms that go into a political campaign: text and phone banks to find potential donors and people to participate in surveys; volunteers willing to knock on doors or show up at rallies with signs and matching shirts; and an army of seasoned consultants, campaign managers and field directors who know how to run an effective campaign in Oakland.
David’s organization, which has a big chapter in San Francisco, established a branch in Oakland last year. Abundance raised money through an IE to back a few candidates who squared off with those supported by unions. In the race for city attorney, Abundance spent over $304,000 supporting Harbin-Forte and opposing the unions’ choice, Richardson.
David said that non-union groups can raise enough money to match or even outpace what unions spend, but “they have to build or exceed infrastructure on the ground to compete with SEIU, the Labor Council and Building Trades.”
Compared to their peers in San Francisco, David believes, unions play an outsized role in Oakland politics. But he also cautioned that organized labor isn’t a monolith, and unions don’t always agree on which candidates to favor.
In the last election, the Northern California Carpenters Union endorsed candidates who were opposed by SEIU Local 1021 and IFPTE 21. In this year’s District 2 race, Murray-Badal has the sole endorsement of the Alameda Labor Council, SEIU Local 1021, IFPTE 21, and others, while her opponent Wang has the backing of the Nor Cal Carpenters Union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 595 and more. Even within a union, membership can disagree on favored candidates.
As the city heads into a pivotal budget process, labor should have a significant voice, Biyani said. “What’s not reasonable is if they say…you can’t lay off any employees, even if it’s going to save the budget. Those are hard lines for us.”
Empower, Biyani acknowledged, is also “on some level an interest group that believes we’re mostly in favor of what Oaklanders want.” His group has endorsed Taylor for mayor and Wang for District 2. In 2024, their committee spent over $423,000 on the election.
Other private interests invested a lot in the last election too. Philip Dreyfuss, a Piedmont-based hedge fund executive, almost single-handedly funded the recall against Thao, spending over $500,000. A committee called SOS Oakland, established by lobbyist Greg McConnell, spent over $57,000 trying to elect a slate of candidates. SOS received a big chunk of its funding from businessmen who are trying to build a coal export terminal in Oakland.
Unions argue their contributions reflect Oakland’s working people
Union officials say they’re different from corporations and wealthy individuals because they represent the interests of regular working people. Olyer, head of Oakland’s fire union, said it’s hypocritical to call unions “dark money” when special interests like coal companies can “literally dump railroad cars of money” into a candidate’s campaign.
“When corporations band together and try to buy a race, that’s seen as exercising their rights under Citizens United,” Olyer said.
Labor officials point out that unions are democratically organized groups, and their money comes from dues paid by thousands of their members. Their political contributions are often determined by collective decision-making.
Olyer said the benefits reaped by unions when their candidates win elections are not the same as when a corporation gets its pick.
“Workers in general in Oakland are not fat cats, they’re not living high on the hog,” Olyer said. “These are solid middle-class incomes with modest benefits that enable people to potentially own a house somewhere in the greater Bay Area.”
Politicians who benefit from labor support are often adamant that they don’t feel obligated to vote the way the unions want them to.
When she ran successfully for county supervisor in 2024, Nikki Fortunato Bas used the campaign slogan “labor’s choice.” She said it was only natural that labor committees would support her platform.
“I think unions represent the interests and the values of working families,” she said in an interview with The Oaklandside last fall. “I view myself as someone who will be independent and still rooted in my community and progressive values. My vote won’t be for sale.”
“The reality is, with Citizens United, IEs are now playing a huge role in politics,” said Andreas Cluver, secretary-treasurer of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County. “With money from tech and non-Oakland businesses influencing elections, “should labor just sit back and let that happen?” he asked.
“This is members’ money — we don’t want to be spending it, but it’s just the way the system works right now. We need to do the best we can to make sure we have electeds who support working people,” Cluver said.
Cluver’s group, which represents 24 different construction unions, endorses candidates it believes to have visions for development, economic growth, and labor-friendly policies in Oakland.
When candidates focus on negative conditions in Oakland, investors and tourists are scared away — delivering a blow to the construction industry and the overall wellbeing of Oakland, Cluver said.
Taylor and his supporters often speak about the need to turn around Oakland’s crime and the conditions on the streets. They blame many of those issues on Thao, and criticize labor for propelling her into office.
But in a recent glossy mailer funded by a labor-backed committee, the unions are curiously now trying to link Taylor to Thao.
Referring to him as a “City Hall insider” who’s responsible for homelessness and homicide rates, the ad features an old photo of Taylor smiling conspiratorially with Thao — labor’s own former preferred candidate.
NATALIE ORENSTEIN
Natalie Orenstein is a senior reporter covering City Hall, housing and homelessness for The Oaklandside. Her reporting on a flood of eviction cases following the end of the Alameda County pandemic moratorium won recognition from the Society of Professional Reporters NorCal in 2024. Natalie was previously on staff at Berkeleyside, where she covered education, including extensive, award-winning reporting on the legacy of school desegregation in Berkeley Unified. Natalie lives in Oakland, grew up in Berkeley, and has only left her beloved East Bay once, to attend Pomona College.More by Natalie Orenstein
ELI WOLFE
Eli Wolfe reports on City Hall for The Oaklandside. He was previously a senior reporter for San José Spotlight, where he had a beat covering Santa Clara County’s government and transportation. He also worked as an investigative reporter for the Pasadena-based newsroom FairWarning, where he covered labor, consumer protection and transportation issues. He started his journalism career as a freelancer based out of Berkeley. Eli’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, NBCNews.com, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Eli graduated from UC Santa Cruz and grew up in San Francisco.More by Eli Wolfe
