The Brief

Labor activity has surged in Los Angeles this year, with everyone from screenwriters to boba shop workers and school bus drivers racking up victories.

But it’s another story in Koreatown, where grocery store workers at the Hannam Chain supermarket have been locked in a year-long-plus battle with their powerful employer over unionization.

The supermarket’s owner, Kee Whan Ha, is one of Koreatown’s most politically-connected developers and civic leaders. Ha famously took up arms to defend the supermarket on Olympic Boulevard during the unrest of 1992.

Today he’s facing a coalition of employees — Korean and Latino immigrants who’ve overcome the language barriers among them to fight for better wages and workplace conditions that they say were particularly egregious during the pandemic.

“They don't care about us,” Hannam cashier Sun Ki Sim said of the company, which includes six locations. “They only care about the money.”

If Sim and other workers could have it their way, the Hannam Koreatown location could become the first Korean grocery in the country to unionize.

But the workers’ dream of a union anytime soon looks to be dimming.

A final vote is pending

Earlier this month, the National Labor Relations Board counted 65 votes in a union election. More employees voted against a union than for it — by a margin of almost 2 to 1. A final tally is pending, as both sides challenge ballots.

Union supporters claim Hannam ran an aggressive anti-union campaign. Ha did not respond to a request for an interview sent through his lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg, who also did not give comment for this story. A manager for the store declined comment, referring questions to the lawyer.

The L.A. office of the labor board is giving both parties until Wednesday to provide their positions on the challenges, according to an NLRB spokesperson.

Union supporters say they're not standing down

Union supporters at Hannam still hold out hope the final vote will go their way, but if it doesn’t, they’re not giving up on a union.

“Even though the progress is very, very slow, I have to keep here and then stand here,” Sim said.

Sun Ki Sim is a cashier at Hannam who supports unionization.

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Sim, who has worked at the store for four and a half years, said she realized workers needed a union during the pandemic when they were not given help with protective equipment or social distancing. As more co-workers caught COVID, Sim had a panic attack and called in sick. She said upon her return, a manager chastised her for missing work.

The message from management, Sim said, was “we have to protect the company. So you have to be here.”

Another employee, Antonia Gonzalez, said that over more than five years of working at Hannam, she would complain of sanitation problems such as a cockroach infestation in the kitchen where she worked. Management, she said, threatened to shut down the kitchen and eliminate jobs if health inspectors ever learned about the bugs.

Instead, the kitchen jobs were outsourced, and Hernandez said she was made a cashier six months ago.

How early momentum was dashed

Union organizers describe early momentum for the unionization effort, buoyed by support from labor-backing politicians like L.A. city council members Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martinez.

But any majority support was broken down by pressure tactics from Hannam and its lawyers over the last year, said José Roberto Hernández, president of the California Restaurant & Retail Workers Union, which has been organizing the Hannam workers.

“They just hire an anti-union law firm with anti-union dissuaders, so that they can start dividing the workforce, scaring some of the workers, promoting some of the other workers, bribing some of the other workers with $1 wage increase here and there,” Hernández said.

Hannam cashier Antonia Gonzalez said regardless of what the outcome of the union election is, she and other workers will keep advocating for worker rights.

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Both sides have been sparring vigorously over the last year which has protracted the union battle. The union election at Hannam actually took place Aug. 3 in a tent outside the store — nearly three months ago. But the labor board impounded the ballots, as it investigated the grocer’s charge that union organizers had used gift cards and pressure by supervisors to build support among workers.

The labor relations board dismissed the complaint, citing “insufficient evidence," and held the vote count earlier this month, during which 22 ballots were challenged.

Efforts to organize Korean BBQ and boba 

Before hitting an impasse with Hannam, California Restaurant & Retail Workers Union, or CRRWU, had notched major victories at other high-profile businesses founded by Asian Americans.

In 2021, workers at the famed Genwa chain, which has three locations in L.A., voted to form a union in what is seen as a first in the country for Korean BBQ restaurants. A contract ratified last year provides overtime pay and retirement accounts to employees, the union said.

Last month, workers at six L.A. County locations of Boba Guys, based in San Francisco, won their bid to unionize in what is also believed to be a first among boba shops in the U.S.

A screenshot of the Genwa Korean BBQ location in Mid-Wilshire.

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For the last several years, CRRWU has been working with Southern California employees of the Korean air purifier manufacturer Coway.

Worker support for the union is high, organizers say, but they are running into strong resistance from the employer, which is represented by the same law firm that works with Hannam.

Hannam owner is a powerful voice in Koreatown 

Union supporters at Hannam have a notoriously tough adversary in their employer, Kee Whan Ha.

During the civil unrest of 1992, Ha grew angry that the Korean-language broadcaster was not telling listeners to defend their businesses. He recounted to NPR in 2012 how he went to the radio station.

“So I know the owner of that Radio Korea, so I brought my handgun and I put it on the table. I told him that we established Koreatown,” Ha said.

As Koreatown was rebuilt, Ha, a UCLA-trained electrical engineer, went on to become one of its biggest developers and landlords. And he expanded his supermarket chain to five locations in Southern California and one in New Jersey, while becoming politically connected at City Hall.

“We know that we cannot survive ourself,” Ha said in the NPR interview. “We have to have a relationship with other communities, as well as the politics, all these things.”

Ha's profile grew as he led the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Korean Chamber of Commerce. In 2013, the City Council named an intersection in Koreatown after him: "Dr. Kee Whan Ha Square.”

Why the stakes are high

It would be no small thing if Ha’s store were the first Korean grocery in the country to be unionized.

“I think it will encourage other ethnic supermarkets to organize as well,” said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center.

Wong said L.A. is a major hub for markets that cater to Latino and Asian communities.

“And yet their wages and working conditions are far inferior to those that are enjoyed by the unionized major chains, such as the Ralphs and Vons and Albertsons,” Wong said.

Hannam is not the first Koreatown grocery to face a unionization drive. Twenty years ago, the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance tried to organize the Assi market but was unsuccessful.

In Southern California’s world of ethnic supermarkets, only employees at El Super locations have collective bargaining agreements through representation by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Local 770 represents a majority of approximately 600 El Super workers, employed across seven stores. A spokesperson for the chapter said workers were able to secure fair wages and recognition of sick leave and seniority.

Hannam workers and their supporters protest owner Kee Whan Ha (in the blue tie) at the 2023 World Korean Business Convention held in Anaheim this month.

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Despite concerns of retaliation for their organizing, union supporters at Hannam have continued to confront Ha.

Earlier this month, the workers and their supporters went to the 2023 World Korean Business Convention in Anaheim to protest the company’s response to their unionization effort and to face Ha, who was the convention’s chair.

As Ha posed for group photos with other business leaders, Hannam Chain workers and their supporters lined up behind them and held up fliers with Ha’s face printed on them, demanding he meet with workers.

Cashier Sun Ki Sim said if she ever got to sit down with Ha, she would tell him that he “is not the only one who makes this business a success.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom has beefed up protections for reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights in his latest rebuke of what he and advocates say are attacks from the Trump administration.

The outgoing governor signed over a dozen bills into law, some authored by Bay Area lawmakers, that increase safeguards around LGBTQ+ identity data, change how health insurance companies reimburse for HIV prevention drugs and expand access to medication abortion on certain community college campuses.

“The Trump administration has launched an all-out assault on the LGBTQ community, using medical records to target U.S. service members and civilians alike, hurting countless people and betraying hard-won trust,” Newsom said in a statement. “California will not stand for it.”

Newsom’s package of new laws is only the latest instance in which California has been at odds with President Donald Trump over policies focused on transgender residents. The administration unsuccessfully sued the state over its refusal to ban transgender athletes from girls sports. The president banned transgender people in the military early into his second term, but one of the bills Newsom signed this weekend expands veteran benefits to service members who were discharged under that policy.

Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California, said the signings were yet another show of how the state responds to the dismantling of LGBTQ+ protections.

“California has spent decades building some of the strongest LGBTQ+ civil rights protections in the country, and we will continue building on that progress as long as our community remains under attack,” Hoang said in a statement.

The California Family Council, an advocacy group with a stated goal of “advancing God’s Design for Life, Family, & Liberty,” has opposed at least one of the signed bills, Senate Bill 1114, over what they say is a prioritization of ideological confidentiality over child welfare.

SB 1114 limits when sexual orientation, intersex and gender identity collected can be shared. Healthcare providers are also required to notify the attorney general when they receive subpoenas for protected healthcare activities.

“1114 does not protect children; it protects bureaucratic secrecy at the expense of parents and families,” the group said in opposition earlier this year.

Newsom also signed SB 934, authored by San Francisco state Sen. Scott Wiener. The law updates the state’s ban on conversion therapy in response to the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a conversion therapy ban in Colorado.

Newsom has long championed LGBTQ+ rights since he was mayor of San Francisco, including issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of a federal ban. But he’s also faced criticism for previous comments on transgender athletes and a recent veto on a bill that would have prevented future governors from honoring extradition requests for gender-affirming healthcare providers facing charges in other states.

In March of last year, Newsom said on his podcast while in conversation with late conservative activist Charlie Kirk that it was unfair for a transgender teenage girl to compete in a track and field competition.

Newsom told KQED’s Political Breakdown that he disagreed with “vitriol” in discussions surrounding the topic, but that it is “unfair in these circumstances.” Months later, Newsom said it needed to be more clear when transgender girl athletes can participate alongside cisgender girls.

Separately and in a veto message a week ago, Newsom said that he agreed with AB 2164’s authors about the importance of protecting gender-affirming healthcare. But he said he was “troubled by the precedent that would be set if an outgoing administration agreed with the Legislature to erode the executive authority of an incoming Governor.”

A Senate bill, co-sponsored by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, strengthens access to the HIV prevention drug PrEP by improving reimbursement practices for healthcare providers. The law requires health insurance companies to cover long-acting injectable PrEP through medical and outpatient prescription drug benefits, which Lara said will remove “unnecessary barriers” to the care.

“By enacting this first-of-its-kind state law, California is again leading the country in making sure insurance companies never stand in the way of people accessing HIV prevention,” said Tyler TerMeer, CEO of San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Newsom’s signature on reproductive rights bills could include an expansion of abortion services to community college campuses.

Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, who represents San Francisco, authored AB 2540, which requires community colleges with student health centers to offer medication abortion services if lawmakers dedicate funding.

Stefani said in announcing the legislation in April that the services are “essential health care, full stop. Yet too many community college students face real barriers to accessing care.”

The state already requires schools in the University of California and California State University systems to offer the same services.

The latest budget from the Olympics organizing committee for the 2028 Games is now public, but like other reports from LA28, it’s light on key financial details.

It comes as L.A.’s city controller pressures LA28 to be more transparent and release more specific data. Controller Kenneth Mejia’s deadline of today (Sept. 28) for more information appears likely to pass with no action from the Olympics organizers.

The newly public report from LA28, which includes a summary of the organization’s 2025 finances, puts LA28’s budget at $7.26 billion, up from a previous estimate of $7.15 billion. That includes expense line items such as $1.4 billion for venue infrastructure, $1.42 billion for “sport, games services & operations,” and $586 million for “other expenses.” It doesn’t provide a more comprehensive breakdown. It also doesn’t include budgets or schedules for specific venue construction projects or a list of contracts that LA28 entered into during the 2025 fiscal year.

The lack of financial specificity is despite guidelines in an agreement between the city of L.A. and LA28 requiring the organizing committee to submit updates on venue improvements, including schedules and budgets, and a list of all contracts it entered into valued at more than $1 million each fiscal year.

Instead, the report includes a single page summarizing its contracts over $1 million, which LA28 says total more than $687 million. That list omits contractor names and specific amounts. According to the city administrative officer, LA28 left out those specifics from the annual report and provided them directly to certain city liaisons because of a concern from LA28 that making details public would risk its ability to negotiate competitive contracts.

That’s not good enough for City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who last month wrote to LA28 General Counsel Elisabeth Freinberg asking the organizing committee to submit a detailed budget, including specific line items breaking down its broad budget categories.

“The most recently submitted $7.26 billion budget is limited to one half page of information that lacks the detail necessary to conduct meaningful analysis and evaluate the feasibility of the budget and LA28’s financial standing,” Mejia wrote in that letter.

In an interview with LAist, Mejia emphasized that the city of Los Angeles is the financial backstop for the Games, meaning if LA28 loses money, L.A. taxpayers will foot the bills the organizers can’t pay.

“ The documents we requested will help us understand how they're doing as an organization, because if they go over budget, we pay,” Mejia said.

LA28 has yet to respond to Mejia’s request, according to his office.

“LA28 works closely with the city to ensure that it satisfies all applicable requirements under the games agreement,” LA28 spokesperson Jacie Prieto Lopez said in an emailed statement to LAist on Monday. “All prior annual reports have been submitted to and accepted by the city, and we look forward to continuing to meet our obligations.”

It’s unclear what the city controller’s next move will be if LA28 doesn’t comply with his deadline for more data. His office says he will continue to push LA28 for more financial information. So far, Mejia is the only city official publicly pressuring LA28 to open its books.

The Senate is poised to pass a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports, an attempt to end “chaos” in an industry that has been upended by skyrocketing athlete payments and near-unrestricted transfers between schools.

Passage of the legislation would be the strongest effort yet by Congress to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.

The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified as some in the industry pleaded with Congress to step in after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges.

“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who negotiated the bill with the top Democrat on the panel, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.

The bill’s backers — more than 70 senators from both parties — say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of student athletes new health and labor protections.

Critics say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect athletes or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.

“This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed an interest in the legislation, and the White House formally endorsed the bill last month. But it could face an uphill battle in the House, which failed repeatedly over the last year to get a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections.

Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill doesn’t pass both chambers by the end of the year.

Bill addresses skyrocketing spending, unlimited transfers

College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million.

The bill codifies the court settlement, including a revenue cap that allows schools to share up to $21.5 million in revenue with their players. The legislation would more than double that amount for some schools, allowing up to an additional $27.5 million in payments through a retention fund, and would give schools and conferences the option of pooling their TV media rights to potentially raise more revenue.

The legislation also aims to stabilize the NCAA transfer portal that has led to players constantly switching teams. It would restrict player transfers to one “free” move over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and also restricts players to five years of total eligibility.

The proposed eligibility limit comes amid backlash to schools that have increasingly pushed boundaries, including LSU’s now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.

“That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “You can see how out-of-hand the situation was getting.”

The bill also would restrict coaches from leaving their schools during the season and prevent conferences from growing larger than 19 programs, an effort to prevent so-called “superleagues” from taking over sports. It would force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as an independent — down from five years in the original bill. That change brought new supporters on board, including Florida State and Clemson of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Critics say it wouldn’t do enough to help athletes

The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and certain scholarships. It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots — an effort to ensure that women’s and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.

Still, some Democrats say it wouldn’t do enough to limit the big money in college sports.

The legislation “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,” Murphy said last week.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said that the new antitrust protections would make it harder for athletes to sue universities, and “taking away their legal rights strikes me as a bridge too far.”

Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.

All four Black Democrats in the Senate — Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — have opposed the bill.

Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, said in a Senate floor speech earlier this month that he was “afforded opportunities I never would have had if it wasn’t for college athletics” but that he also “saw how unjust the NCAA is.”

He said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws.

Some Republicans also said it is overreach.

The legislation “goes way too far inserting the federal government into collegiate athletics,” said Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who is opposing it.

House passage is uncertain

Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.

House lawmakers won’t return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it’s unclear what will be on Republican leaders’ agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.

Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have — a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.

House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., said in a statement in May that “any lasting framework must confront the central issue that continues to cast uncertainty over the future of college sports: whether student-athletes will ultimately be treated as employees.”

“Congress cannot deliver real stability, consistency, or certainty to schools, conferences, and student-athletes while leaving that question unresolved,” the two Republicans said.

Each year, Congress passes laws which allocate money to the federal government's various programs and agencies. Trump, for the second year in a row, is refusing to send some of that money to the places that Congress says it has to go, setting off a fresh battle with lawmakers over who controls federal spending.

Of the $810 million being withheld, $567 million comes from programs that "provided services to refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens," according to a memo from the White House.

The move, called a pocket rescission, is illegal, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent, non-partisan watchdog agency charged with providing federal agencies fact-based information.

Article 1 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes and decide how federal funds are spent — known as power of the purse. If the president disagrees, he or she can send a request to Congress to cancel the fund, but that is supposed to happen with 45 days notice in order to let Congress agree or disagree.

A pocket rescission happens when the president decides to cancel funds without ample time for Congress to weigh in or reallocate the money. With the end of the fiscal year less than a week away, the announcement means the funds will go unspent and Congress can't respond.

"This is the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress's Constitutional power of the purse," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Appropriations committee, wrote in a statement posted to X. "OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding."

The canceled funds are fueling anger from Democrats who say OMB director Russell Vought is violating the separation of powers and undermining Congressional authority.

"This is theft from the American people, plain and simple," wrote Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee on X. "Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious, because Vought is saying their votes don't count."

"Donald Trump knows he can't get these cuts through Congress, so he is illegally making them through the back door," Rep. Brendan Boyle, the top Democrat on the House Budget committee, said in a statement. "Trump's actions are a blatant attack on Congress's constitutional power of the purse."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The administration also says it withheld $15 million to a Justice Department team tasked with "preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony," $70 million to "programs provide grants and fellowships to support institutions bringing foreign students and faculty to the United States to study or teach language," and tens of millions to various research and non-profit grant programs that target climate change or racial and gender minority work.

A detailed accounting provided by the administration can be found here.
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