The Brief

Before taking the top leadership post at UCLA, Gene Block made a name for himself as a neurobiologist with an expertise in biological clocks — how bodies regulate being awake and asleep during night and day.

On Thursday, however, Block was at the center of a different cycle: He said he will step down as chancellor of UCLA, effective July 2024.

“This decision was by no means an easy one,” Block wrote in an email to UCLA students and employees. “But I have the greatest confidence in UCLA’s future, and I feel that the time is right — for me, for my family, and for our campus.”

Block’s legacy

In a written statement, UCLA said Block helped the university increase enrollment, guarantee student housing, raise its national and regional profile, and nearly doubled university research funding.

UCLA faculty and students agree with some of the praise, but also say Block fell short at times.

“I am especially pleased by the initiatives launched to address the need for increased faculty and student diversity and a more diverse [administration],” said Belinda Tucker, UCLA professor emerita of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences who has researched Black family relationships.

During Block’s tenure many UCLA students and faculty engaged in the national conversations about race. Some faculty praised the chancellor for striking the right tone at times of conflict, such as the 2020 George Floyd protests. When LAPD used the school's Jackie Robinson stadium to process arrests of protesters, Block said the administration was "nothing short of outraged."

“His responses seemed to be from a place of honest concern and clear opinion and not just the wordsmithing from a corporate communications professional,” said UCLA psychology researcher Edward Dunbar.

“I think this sensitivity set an important tone for our students, to realize some persons in positions of power took the moral responsibility of their roles seriously,” Dunbar said.

Other faculty praised Block for elevating faculty from underrepresented communities to university leadership positions.

In 2019 UCLA installed professor Mishuana Goeman as the first Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs. The tribal relations position has led to cooperation with the area Gabrielino tribe. Last year Block promoted renowned UCLA Black scholar Darnell Hunt to the university’s top academic job.

Faculty constraints

Campus growth has led to a need for more instructors. In the last 10 years the number of faculty lecturers — part-time instructors who are not provided the benefits and security of tenured faculty — has risen 44% at UCLA, compared with 25% in the entire UC system.

A six-week strike by workers at UCLA and other campuses underlined that the university has fallen short of raising wages and working conditions for all employees.

“The biggest, gargantuan, and most massive thorn is that UCLA is a bureaucratic nightmare and the UAW strike only served to exacerbate that,” said UCLA public health researcher Jennifer Wagman. She praised Block, though, for increased campus funding to support faculty-led research on social justice, racism, and fighting discrimination and hatred.

Some of Wagman’s students took Block and UCLA leadership to task for falling short in supporting survivors of sexual violence. And about a decade into Block's tenure a UCLA gynecologist was arrested for sexual assault after women said the campus ignored complaints.

UCLA said Block plans to stay on campus to resume his neurobiology research.

Three days after polls closed, the race to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom remains unsettled. On Friday, Republican candidate Steve Hilton joined LAist’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle to discuss where the vote stands and his confidence in the election as he currently leads the polls.

The 2020 election results

During a previous interview on AirTalk with LAist host Austin Cross, Hilton shied away from disputing President Donald Trump' s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. However, when asked again in his latest interview with Mantle about the 2020 presidential election, Hilton affirmed that President Joe Biden won.

“Now there's no question, everybody knows that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and I don't think there's any doubt about that,” Hilton said.

The current California primary

Hilton also addressed the concerns about California's universal vote-by-mail system, which means the vote count can stretch on for weeks. The slow pace has raised concerns from some critics about the legitimacy of California’s elections.

“I've got strong things to say about the pace, but I want to reassure everyone who may be listening who's a supporter of mine that we're keeping a close eye on things,” Hilton said about the current California primary results.

Hilton said during the conversation that he's confident California's election is being administered fairly.

“I'm sure every other campaign has lawyers standing by ready to act if there's anything untoward that we think requires that kind of action, but so far we haven't seen anything that meets that standard,” he said.

When is a minimum wage hike of more than $11 per hour actually a pay cut?

That question has dominated the debate over a current California housing bill that has riven the state’s two most powerful construction worker unions and many state legislative Democrats reluctant to get on the wrong side of either group.

Assembly Bill 1751, authored by Fullerton Democrat Sharon Quirk-Silva, would kick aside regulatory barriers to building townhouses — tightly clustered, multistory homes. In exchange for this fast-tracked approval process, townhouse developers would be required to pay their workers at least $28 per hour.

That’s a significant pay bump over the statewide minimum wage of $16.90.

But the fiercest opposition to the bill has come from what might seem like an unexpected source: The State Building and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella organization that represents electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers and other skilled construction trade unions.

The trades — as the council is colloquially known — argue that the new wage floor could have the paradoxical side-effect of driving down the “prevailing wages” enjoyed by many of their members. Prevailing wages are mandatory minimum pay rates for publicly-funded or supported construction projects, which include many affordable housing developments and other projects propelled forward by recent state law in California. State and federal regulators set prevailing rates based on surveys of the most common wages in each field and geographic area. Because union pay scales can cover hundreds of similarly employed workers, those union-level wages often set the prevailing wage.

In a testy debate on the Assembly floor earlier this month, Quirk-Silva stressed — repeatedly — that the bill would in no way affect the state-set wage rates.

“It does not replace prevailing wage,” she said. “It does not undercut prevailing wage. This bill leaves prevailing wage exactly where it stands in current law.”

The trades aren’t buying it, noting that the federal government sets its own rates for federally-supported projects. But the group’s bigger beef may boil down to precedent.

For years, the building trades have battled any legislation aimed at easing regulations on the construction of new housing unless it also included pro-union guarantees. Those are either union-level prevailing wage pay requirements or, in more recent years, even more restrictive “skilled and trained” rules that require developers to hire apprenticeship program graduates, the vast majority of whom are union members.

Quirk-Silva’s townhouse streamlining bill introduces a new standard: a minimum wage far lower than what most trades members already make.

Making a meager minimum wage hike the new bone that pro-housing bills throw to construction workers would “signify the new norm,” said Chris Hannan, president of the Trades Council. “When you start a trend of doing a minimum wage, then that becomes the new go-to.”

The trades and carpenters, at it again

Standing on the other side of the debate, supporting the new wage standard, are California’s unionized carpenters.

The trades battling the carpenters is a familiar face-off in Sacramento. This isn’t even the first time the groups have publicly locked horns over this specific wage proposal.

Last summer, Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and longtime ally of the carpenters, inserted residential construction worker minimum wage of between $28 and $40 per hour into a budget bill in the final hours of the fiscal year. Aside from high-rise construction developments where the use of steel and concrete tend to draw more specialized workers, unions represent relatively few laborers who build California homes, the carpenters argued at the time. The new wage standard would be a modest corrective for those non-union laborers whose current wage floor is the state minimum wage.

For years, carpenters union leaders have argued that improving working standards for low-wage workers presents an “organizing opportunity” for the union.

The trades were apoplectic. Dozens of union members crowded in the budget bill hearing to decry what they saw as an anti-union reversal of state labor policy. One representative likened the measure to “Jim Crow” laws. Many labor-friendly Democrats on the committee recoiled; the proposal was shelved.

This year, the idea has been given a bit more time for debate, though the trades and some lawmakers have still complained of a process they see as rushed.

When Quirk-Silva’s bill was introduced in early February, it focused solely on townhouse regulations. The wage language was added only in time for its second committee hearing in late April. (Quirk-Silva’s staff declined to make her available for an interview to explain that delay or discuss the bill in general, citing personal family matters. On the Assembly floor, she explained the late addition in part by noting “severe health issues” among staff and family members.)

Since then the entirety of the legislative debate has been focused on the wage issue.

That itself is a notable development: The bill exempts the construction of townhomes from both environmental review and the jurisdiction of elected local city councils and planning boards. Just a few years ago, such a proposal would have made for a capitol-shaking, headline-grabbing fight. But a year after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law exempting most urban housing developments from environmental litigation, the land-use implications appear to be an afterthought.

At an Assembly floor vote last month, San Diego Assemblymember Chris Ward referred to the minimum wage issue as the “900 pound gorilla.” He, like many Democrats who spoke on the bill, said that he supported the legislation in general, but that he remained wary of the “unresolved” questions about how the new wage rate would affect existing labor standards.

The bill needed 41 out of 80 “yes” votes to move onto the Senate. It passed with just 47.

Hike or pay cut?

Quirk-Silva’s office tried to get around the prevailing wage fight early on.

Prevailing wages are required of publicly funded works, including many affordable housing projects. They are set by the California Department of Industrial Relations, which sets its rates based on the most common wage for each job type in each region of the state.

Quirk-Silva’s bill specifically bars the state department from taking the new $28 per hour townhome wages into account when running those calculations, lest a glut of townhome builders inadvertently bring down the wages owed to union roofers and plumbers.

The trades aren’t satisfied with that concession. That’s because the federal government conducts its own wage surveys and set its own prevailing wage for federally-funded infrastructure projects.

The current federal prevailing wage required for a residential roofer in Sacramento, for example, is $46.73 per hour plus benefits. That number is based on the most common wage paid for that job in the area or — if no single rate is paid to at least 30% of the workers in the survey — on the regional average.

“The federal government won’t give a rat’s ass about what this bill says,” Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for Trades-affiliated unions, said at the bill’s April hearing. “And they will set the prevailing wage rate for all the crafts at $28.”

The trades “have a case” in this argument, said Kevin Duncan, an economist at Colorado State University Pueblo who has studied prevailing wage policy’s effect on construction costs. Imagine a smaller market with a relatively low unionization rate. If the bill uncorked a geyser of contractors paying all their low-wage workers exactly $28 per hour, “that would be the prevailing rate — and with zero benefits,” he said.

Backers of the bill dispute that, saying such a specific outcome is unlikely given how many contractors are likely to use this specific townhouse bill. They also argue that vanishingly few residential roofers do federal public works jobs in Sacramento — or anywhere in California — so changes in the federal prevailing wage for residential projects aren’t likely to affect many workers anyway. Instead, most roofers are non-union on privately-funded projects and many are being paid less than $28 per hour, said Danny Curtin, director of the California Council of Carpenters.

To say that raising those wages “will actually bring everybody else's wages down, defies comprehension,” he said at the hearing.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

For all the talk of a governor’s race between two Republicans, or even two Democrats, it’s looking like voters are in for a typical partisan matchup in November.

In predictably Democratic California, there’s no need for a political science degree or a crystal ball to confidently predict the result of a general election face-off between Xavier Becerra, the current Democratic front-runner, and former Fox News host Steve Hilton, a Republican.

Despite the top-two primary system in which the two highest vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party, likely Democratic cakewalks abound further down the ballot after Tuesday’s election.

So why is it so rare in California, which hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006 and where Democratic voters outnumber registered Republicans almost two-to-one, to put two Democrats on the ballot in the general election?

For all its political reputation as the left coast, California is simply not overwhelmingly Democratic enough to regularly advance two Democrats to the general election, said Andrew Sinclair, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College who has studied the effects of California’s top two.

With Democratic candidates regularly earning roughly 60% of the statewide vote, the electorate is sufficiently left-leaning to make the outcome of Democrat-versus-Republican general elections fairly predictable. But Democrats don’t make up quite enough of the vote share to push two Democratic candidates through the open primary except in somewhat unusual circumstances, he said.

“After about 60% to 65% Democratic vote share, it starts to get much more likely to get D-on-D races,” he said. In recent statewide races, the percentage of votes cast for the Democratic candidate has hovered around 60%, “right in the electoral dead zone,” said Sinclair.

The promise of top two

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

California’s unusual “top two” election system puts every candidate on the same primary ballot; the first and second place winners progress to the general election. The idea, approved by voters in 2010, was advertised as an engine of both political moderation and more meaningful choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties were opposed.

Proponents argued that pulling candidates out of a purely partisan primary system would encourage them to appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum, rather than just the party base.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks during an event at the Sutter Club hosted by the Sacramento Press Club on Nov. 17, 2023.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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The new voting scheme would “change the dysfunctional political system and get rid of the paralysis and the partisan bickering” in California politics, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the proposition, said at the time.

In districts where one party dominates the field, allowing multiple candidates from that same party to compete was meant to make general elections competitive.

But if current election results hold — and with so many ballots still left to count, they may not — Californians don’t appear likely to see many competitive statewide races in November.

In Tuesday’s races for lieutenant governor, attorney general, controller and treasurer, a series of high-profile, well-financed Democrats are competing against Republicans who range from long- to longer-shot. In congressional contests in West Los Angeles and Napa Valley, where upstart progressives challenged moderate incumbents, the upstarts appear to have been boxed out, leaving the two veteran Democratic representatives, Mike Thompson and Brad Sherman, to face ill-fated Republicans.

A notable exception is the insurance commissioner’s race, in which two Democrats — Jane Kim and Ben Allen — hold the two top spots. The 2018 lieutenant governor’s race was also a Dem-on-Dem contest. It’s happened a few times in U.S. Senate races. But in most cases, a reversion to the polarized partisan norm is the rule.

That’s in part thanks to the primary electorate itself.

Fewer voters tend to turn out in June elections, and those who do tend to be committed partisans prepared to vote for one party or another. Though the top-two system is officially nonpartisan, Democratic voters treat it like a partisan primary, herding around the person they consider the strongest representative of their party, with Republicans doing the same, said Eric McGhee, a political researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

There may be a handful of “pure independents in the middle” who will swing between parties, moderating the outcome and potentially crossing party lines to put a centrist over the top.

But such voters are rare — especially in June.

Case in point: Matt Mahan, the moderate Democratic mayor of San Jose who ran for governor criticizing “extremism on both sides.” With his focus on pocketbook issues and promises to limit his own party’s state spending, Mahan was the “poster child” for a top-two system designed for “all those so-called people who are going to come to the middle,” said Democratic consultant Steve Maviglio.

“He got 4%,” said Maviglio, a top-two critic who voted for Mahan. “Voters are partisan, at the end of the day.”

Does the system create more moderates?

Californians are much more likely to see same-party general election contests in local races, where an individual district is more likely than the state as a whole to be overwhelmingly dominated by one party.

In congressional races in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and across Los Angeles and in legislative races in liberal enclaves across California, two Democrats are on track to head to November.

USC political science professor Christian Grose said over the last decade, about a third of legislative general election races have been between two members of the same party.

Removing the choice between parties from the general election can have benefits like allowing voters to choose based on true policy differences or perceptions of competence rather than simply siding with a party, he said. But it can also invite voters to make choices based on "things not related to governance," like gender or race.

In a 2020 paper, Grose found that congressional candidates in top-two states have an incentive to tack toward the center, suggesting the top-two system works as intended whether or not the candidates end up competing in a same-party general election.

And in a newly created purple district that runs northeast of Sacramento, former Republican turned independent Rep. Kevin Kiley appears to have claimed first place in his race. Running without official party backing may be easier under a nonpartisan primary system.

Shutouts and cynical games

There are obvious downsides.

Tom Charron, co-founder of the California Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, says the top-two primary system is vulnerable to “cynical gaming” in which one candidate boosts the candidate they consider easier to beat in the general election.

Newsom did that in 2018 by tacitly steering Republican voters toward Republican John Cox, whom he viewed as a weaker opponent than fellow Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa.

Likewise, in the 2024 primary, a super PAC backing Democratic U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff put millions of dollars behind Republican candidate Steve Garvey, undercutting Democratic former Rep. Katie Porter’s chances.

Another possible problem popped up early in the life of the reform. In 2012, the first cycle after voters approved the top two, four Democrats crowded into a race to represent San Bernardino in Congress. Two Republicans did the same. The Democrats ended up slicing up the left-of-center vote so thinly that the Republicans won the top two spots, despite Democrats holding a modest voter registration edge.

A more egregious example took place 10 years later when too many Republican candidates vying to represent a deeply conservative state Senate district east of Fresno divided the GOP vote, leaving Democrats in the top two.

That perverse outcome was top of mind for many Democratic voters earlier this year when a glut of Democrats running for governor threatened to leave the top two spots to Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Bianco.

With Becerra and fellow Democrat Tom Steyer well ahead of Bianco in the vote count, the shutout didn’t happen, showing how unlikely it was, said Claremont McKenna’s Sinclair.

“In some sense, the Democratic Party did everything they possibly could to make (a shutout) happen,” Sinclair said. He pointed to a “low-quality field of candidates” likely to divide the vote evenly, the abrupt exit of front-runner Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and the failure of the party or any of its California luminaries to endorse anyone.

If nothing else, the fear among highly engaged Democratic voters may have led a decisive number to vote strategically to avoid a shutout, Sinclair said.

Changes on the way?

Even though it was eventually averted, the prospect of a Republican governor in California in 2026 has led some to reconsider the top two.

Maviglio has filed a proposed ballot measure to repeal the top-two system and return to partisan primaries.

"The fact that there are any (same-party general elections) is simply undemocratic," Maviglio said. "People have the choice between only one party, like they're in the Soviet Union?"

In theory, Democrat-on-Democrat races are supposed to give voters a choice between distinct ideological options within the same party — a business-backed moderate, say, and a Bernie-boosting progressive.

In practice, voters are quite bad at making such distinctions, said McGhee at PPIC.

“The evidence we have of how voters view these contests is that they don't have a clue who the moderate or the liberal is,” he said. “It’s always a good bet that voters are way way way less tapped into the nuances of what’s going on than you are if you’re interested in politics.”

Others are pushing for a third option — ranked-choice voting.

Charron, with the Ranked Choice Voting Coalition, said his group is advocating for California to move toward an Alaska-style voting system in which the top four or five primary finishers advance to a ranked-choice general election.

Ranked choice allows voters to rank their candidates by preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t receive enough votes to win, their vote goes to their second preference, then third, and so on. Several California cities already use it for mayoral contests, including Oakland and San Francisco.

Charron said the system encourages a more diverse field of candidates and gives voters more choice, since few would worry about being a “spoiler” for a fellow party member.

In May, the nonpartisan nonprofit Independent Voter Project helped launch a group aimed at bringing ranked choice to California via a constitutional amendment that could go before voters in 2028.

“It's very exciting for us right now that these conversations are coming up because of some of the risks that we've seen in this primary season, in particular,” said Charron.

Kate Wolffe contributed reporting for this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The labor market is finding its footing.

U.S. employers added jobs for the third month in a row in May, according to a report Friday from the Labor Department. Job gains for March and April were also revised significantly higher.

Restaurants and bars added 48,000 jobs last month as summer approached, while construction companies and local governments were also hiring. Healthcare, which has been a steady source of employment gains, added another 35,000 jobs.

Banks and insurance companies, meanwhile, cut jobs. The financial sector overall cut 22,000 jobs in May.

Overall, the report shows hiring has picked up steam this spring after anemic job growth last year. Over the last three months, employers have added an average of 188,000 jobs each month.

Meanwhile, the workforce grew slightly in May as 83,000 people began working or looking for work, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%.

Despite the uptick in hiring, employers are not having to offer big wage increases to attract workers. Average wages in May were up just 3.4% from a year ago. That's likely not enough to keep pace with inflation — with prices for the 12 months ending in April up 3.8%.

Prices have been rising rapidly since the U.S. launched its war with Iran just over three months ago. And now, with signs that the job market is stabilizing, the Federal Reserve, under new chair Kevin Warsh, is likely to focus its attention on getting inflation under control.

That makes it unlikely the central bank will cut interest rates any time soon, despite pressure to do so from President Trump.

The Labor Department is set to report on May inflation next week, providing Fed policymakers with another key data point ahead of its next policy meeting in mid-June.

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