Freshman files: Assemblymember Liz Ortega

Labor unions have been at the center of Assemblymember Liz Ortega’s life since early childhood and the centerpiece of her career.

So it’s natural that her top priorities in the state Assembly are also labor aligned, including legislation mandating that high school students learn about labor laws.

Ortega, 45, learned at a young age that her family had health insurance because her parents had union jobs, her mother doing laundry for hotels and her father as a dishwasher and then a second job, this one a union position as a janitor at the Oakland Coliseum.

She also learned about many of the world’s injustices from a young age, after her mother brought her and her brother from Guadalajara, Mexico when she was three and her brother just six months old. As in many other immigrant families, her father had come first but her mother “got tired of waiting and just decided ‘I’m going to go on my own,’” Ortega said.

Her mother made the dangerous journey alone in 1980 with two small children, without telling other family members about her plan. Arriving in San Diego, Ortega said her mother “called my dad and said, ‘I’m here, come pick me up.’”

Ortega proved a quick study in English after landing in Oakland, where she spent mornings with a relative who watched English-language soap operas. She became a go-to for Spanish-speaking family and other community members who needed help translating, often navigating adult spaces such as doctors’ offices, immigration applications and unemployment forms – tasks she sometimes resented but later came to embrace.

“I used to come home from school and my mom would find some random woman that she met at the store or bus stop that needed help and she would be there waiting for me, my mom and dad would be like, ‘Liz can do it,’” she said.

So in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan announced an amnesty program for approximately 3 million immigrants living in the country illegally, Ortega remembers “having to be that 8- or 9-year-old waiting at 4 a.m. in San Francisco to fill out all those documents.’”

Her path to the Legislature came through several high-profile labor union roles in the east San Francisco Bay, culminating as executive secretary-treasurer of the Alameda Labor Council, where she represented more than 135,000 workers in more than 135 unions.

After years helping others get elected to office through her union work but never putting herself up as a candidate, Ortega in November easily beat fellow Democrat Shawn Kumagai, a moderate member of the Dublin City Council and district director to Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, in the newly redrawn AD20. Kumagai ran to the right of Ortega, stressing his support for public safety and vowing to back Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CARE Courts plan, the conservatorship law that would allow officials to order mental health care and substance abuse treatment for some chronically homeless people. Ortega opposes the plan.

No knock against her fellow progressive Democrats, but Ortega said many come to the Legislature and support labor, “but it’s not always who they are at the core.”

One of the most diverse districts in the state, AD 20 incorporates vast working-class swaths of the East Bay, but also more conservative and well-off tech worker hubs such as Dublin.

Ortega said she felt the pull to run after seeing “what a difference it makes to have someone who supports labor versus someone who IS labor” in the Legislature.

Naturally, Ortega was appointed to the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee, along with spots on the Higher Education, Insurance and Public Safety committees.

One of her first bills, AB 800, would mandate a one-week social studies curriculum for high schoolers on workers’ rights on the job – things like not having to work past 11 p.m. or serve alcohol, which are enshrined in employment law but are sometimes violated by employers. She has also introduced legislation that would require insurers to cover Narcan, the nasal spray that can counter opioid overdose, if it is approved for over-the-counter sales, which an FDA committee has endorsed.

No knock against her fellow progressive Democrats, but Ortega said many come to the Legislature and support labor, “but it’s not always who they are at the core.”

To that end, she is enthusiastic about supporting the longstanding effort of legislative employees to unionize. Despite Democratic supermajorities in both houses, concrete efforts to enshrine meal and breaks, overtime and other benefits have repeatedly failed in Sacramento. The excuses for blocking unionization are “just the same gamut that we hear with other employers,” like telling workers ‘We’re a family,’” she said.

Ortega said she intends to play the long game in the Legislature, introducing a “relatively small” package of legislation this year.

“I’m thinking about it like I want to be – I’m going to be – here for 12 years. Everything is about incremental change. So if this year I only help 200 people, that’s 200 people that I otherwise wouldn’t have helped.”

Juliet Williams is an editor and writer based in San Francisco. She is a former Northern California news editor, correspondent and regional editor for The Associated Press.