Kamala Harris’s California quid pro quo for unions

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Kamala Harris is now the Democrats' likely nominee to succeed Biden and she may pull the administration's already pro-union labor policy even further leftwards. A little-remembered case from a decade ago when she was California attorney general indicates how far Harris is willing to go.

A lawsuit by a healthcare company alleged that, then-attorney general Harris abused her position  to pressure the company into unionizing. Harris was allegedly acting on behalf of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers (SEIU-UHW), one of her campaign contributors. The case was eventually thrown out of court, primarily on the grounds that Harris had qualified immunity from such lawsuits.

The 2017 lawsuit by Prime Healthcare Services alleged that in 2015, Harris imposed unusual and onerous requirements on the company when it tried to purchase another healthcare company, the Daughters of Charity Health System. Prime claimed that Harris entered into an unlawful scheme with SEIU-UHW: in exchange for the union's political and financial support, Harris would block Prime from acquiring the nonprofit hospital unless it caved to the union's demands.

The California attorney general's office oversees the sale and purchase of nonprofits and their assets. In most cases, the office required that any company purchasing a healthcare provider nonprofit had to maintain the nonprofit's current level of services for at least five years. Harris expanded that requirement to 10 years in the case of Prime's attempted purchase. That additional expense rendered the planned $843 million sale unprofitable. It was reportedly the only time Harris imposed such a condition.

Prime Healthcare Services alleged that the union then told them that it could make the problem go away.  "Dave Regan, the president of SEIU-UHW, repeatedly informed Prime… that Harris would approve Prime's acquisition only if Prime allowed SEIU-UHW to unionize workers at Prime's hospitals," according to court documents. SEIU donated to Harris's 2010 and 2014 campaigns for attorney general as well as her successful 2016 Senate bid.

A district court dismissed the lawsuit. It didn't dispute that there may have been an arrangement between Harris and the union. It instead said that Harris had the legal power to rig the system this way. Or, at least, that the law didn't explicitly say that the attorney general couldn't do that.

"Do political motivations or considerations constitute a legally impermissible motive? Does acceding to union political pressure dislodge all of the rational reasons underlying Harris's disparate treatment of Prime, rendering her acts malicious, irrational, or plainly arbitrary? The answer remains unclear," the court said in its ruling throwing out the lawsuit. It also found that Harris had qualified immunity for her actions as attorney general.

The case helps to explains why, while other Democratic allies fretted whether Harris was the best choice to replace Biden, the SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and the American Federation of Teachers, among other unions, were quick to endorse Harris's bid to be the new democratic presidential nominee. . It's not just that the Biden-Harris administration has been arguably the mostpro-union administration since Harry Truman's. Harris had proven since her days in the Golden State that she'll bend the rules as far as she can to benefit unions. "[S]he has made sure to use every lever of government to do everything possible to make things better for working people," said SEIU International President April Verrett.

Harris would be a boon to union leaders. Whether workers need or want this type of help is a different matter.