By admin 
SEIU Local 1000 — California’s largest state worker union with about 100,000 members — is accusing managers at the Department of Rehabilitation and Department of Public Health of telling employees to take down union-related materials. It’s a tactic, the union says, that interferes with recruitment and member participation.
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It also accuses the rehabilitation department of telling the union there were no available rooms a day organizers planned a site visit. SEIU Local 1000 said calendars shared with department staffers showed available rooms.
SEIU Local 1000 maintains California law and their contract allow the union to distribute literature and reserve rooms. The union filed charges with the Public Employment Relations Board this month.
“(The Department of Public Health) is continually and brazenly interfering with union recruitment efforts, openly discouraging employees from becoming or remaining members of an employee organization,” SEIU Local 1000 said in the PERB filing regarding CDPH.
In late July — around the same time SEIU Local 1000 filed a charge accusing the state of bargaining in bad faith — a manager at CDPH told an employee to remove two flyers from their cubicle, the charge states. One was a photo of Gov. Gavin Newsom with the text “Union Busting is Disgusting” while the other was about the union’s strike schools.
The day before the employee was told to remove the materials, a different manager sent an agency-wide email saying workers cannot have materials in their workspace that are “libelous, obscene, defamatory or of a partisan political nature.”
SEIU Local 1000 said the Newsom photo doesn’t fit that category because his administration rejected all monetary requests made by the union. It also pointed to the widespread distribution of the governor’s photograph.
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“To claim that the photo was politically partisan in nature would also be dishonest as Newsom’s photo is affixed on a wall in every state building and the photo did not suggest or make any claim about a political party or try to sway a vote,” the union wrote in the PERB filing.
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Employees at CDPH — specifically within the Office of AIDS — started noticing flyers were being taken down in break rooms and bulletin boards in the following months, according to the filing. That extended at least into October. This included taking down a poster titled “Watch out for S.P.I.T.”
The poster encouraged workers to reach out to their steward if their boss is trying to discourage them from union participation. This included watching out for S.P.I.T., which stands for surveillance, promises, interrogation and threats.
Rehabilitation officials also told staff to remove posters and union signage, according to a PERB filing. That happened in late August. The next week the union emailed the agency about a site visit. It reportedly told SEIU Local 1000 there were wasn’t enough space to accommodate the visit. A screenshot of a room calendar, attached to the PERB charge, showed available space.
In October — about a week before the union’s strike — a manager said SEIU Local 1000 flyers had to be removed from a lunch table and could only be placed on the union bulletin board. The next week — the day before the strike — a different manager reportedly interrupted a presentation saying, “I’m going to shut this down,” when a worker asked a union representative how to document the strike on timesheets. The representative had to answer that question in a more private setting.
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This story was originally published November 11, 2026 at 5:00 AM.