Unemployment Benefit on the Way for Striking Workers

Assemblymember Friedman Co-authors Landmark Bill

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—Assemblymember Laura Friedman is co-authoring a landmark bill to provide striking workers with unemployment benefits. It has been a hot labor summer. While workers ranging from Kaiser employees to nurses, to Hollywood’s writers and actors are fighting to return to work, they face an uphill battle. One studio executive openly bragged to the press that their endgame was to allow things to drag on until the workers began losing their apartments and houses.

Homelessness should never be a tool employers are able to leverage against their employees. Homelessness is already a crisis in this state. We cannot allow employers to add to the homeless population to pad their bottom line.

Striking workers want nothing more than to be back at work. Until that day comes though, their children shouldn’t have to go to bed hungry or lose the bed they sleep safely in at night.

Last year Governor Newsom signed subsidized healthcare for striking workers into law after employers terminated the healthcare of striking workers. Workers cannot fight for safer working conditions or improved wages if their home or their medical lifeline can be cut. Nor can they do so if the cost is their children going hungry at night.

If New York and New Jersey can extend unemployment benefits to striking workers, so can California. Assemblymember Friedman happily stands alongside California’s workers and is happy to help them get back to work.