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It is odd to me that you could be forced to pay dues to unions, and then they can take some of that money to get involved in political campaigns, potentially voting against your interests. It feels especially perverse when it is a publicly sector union, basically sending taxpayer money back to politicians.

All that said, the rich venture capitalists who are featured in this article are doing the same thing. Gathering huge sums of money and donating to PACs and distorting all of politics. I would argue they are a bigger problem in terms of drowning out the everyday American.

Just some ghouls trying to turn non-unionized workers against one of the only segments with union protections.
ghouls implies they're old and mostly harmless, but these are young, aggressive, deeply funded, and very, very dangerous

at this point I'm convinced that comments like these are LLM based and are designed to shape a narrative and keep people lax / unconcerned

California (the titular state) is not right-to-work, so you can be forced to pay dues, but this does NOT extend to public sector jobs. Reread the article knowing that the wealthy VC's initial premise is flawed from the start. They meekly mention this reality at the end, ignoring the agency employees have had to choose to be in their union or not. The author is also very politically involved, and unions serve as a political force against his own PACs and interests.

This whole thing is just more wealthy business owners trying to turn the public against unions, which is an effort as old as unions.

> The Real Fight: Public Sector vs. Private Sector Unions

They claim the "Real" fight is against public sector unions, but largely blame private unions (eg. teamsters vs Waymo) in their examples.

> It’s a very bad thing for California to be the innovation center of the world and Golden Goose of the state while simultaneously the biggest, most powerful special interests want to destroy it.

Public sector jobs, respectfully, are not California's center of innovation. Again, bad-faith arguing.

Unions spending money on elections: bad, evil!

Gary Tan and his VC buddies spending their money on elections: good, just even

Because as we all know US politics has a problem with unions spending millions to influence elections /s