Lorena Gonzalez

There were other women who were doing...

Lorena Gonzalez was head of the San Diego Labor Council, um, uh, Cindy Chavez in the Santa Clara, San Jose.

So almost every labor council across California was led by a woman and a woman of color.

Wow.

Other opponents of Prop 40 include the California Teachers Association and Planned Parenthood, although some Planned Parenthood staff have broken with leadership to announce their support of the billionaire tax.

For more, we're joined in New York by Lorena González, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, which backs Prop 40, and in Boston, we're joined by Congress member Ro Khanna, Democratic Congress member from, uh, California.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Lorena González, let's begin with you.

Why do you support this? This would be, as Bernie Sanders says, historic, the billionaire wealth tax.

Well, look, when, um, Trump passed H.R.1, we know that they cut, uh, our healthcare, working people are going to pay for that, to give billionaires a tax break.

I'd like to ask Representative Ro Khanna, uh, y- why you are backing, uh, this, uh, proposition, and also, uh, y- your, uh, your reaction to your fellow Democratic colleague, Governor Newsom, opposing it.

First, let me say what an honor it is to follow Navi Pillay, who won the Nobel Prize, uh, for finding that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, something still too many Democratic politicians in America refuse to do.

And I appreciate Lorena González's extraordinary leadership to help get this billionaire tax on the ballot.

So today on Blood and the Machine, we're going to dive into these fights with the woman who's at the center of many of them.

Lorena Gonzalez is a former state legislator and current president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, and she's a driving force supporting both Prop 40 and the slate of new laws designed to protect workers from AI.

And as we'll see, it's all very much related.

[upbeat music] Today, I am joined by Lorena Gonzalez, the president of the California Federation of Labor Unions.

Um, and we have a lot to talk about today.

Uh, of, for one thing, uh, as I've kind of covered in my newsletter a little bit, uh, there has been a very promising sort of round of victories in, uh, in California's state legislature, a number of laws, uh, designed to protect workers from AI abuses by bosses, um, that, uh, cleared the hurdle and made it, made it into, uh, into law despite a, uh, let's say, uh, a thorny or complex governor, uh, towards... who, who has ties to Silicon Valley and is eyeing a presidential run.

That is it for today.

Thank you everyone for dropping by and listening in.

It's Newsom all over the place for the first quarter of the story just talking about how dangerous this moment is because of Trump.

Todd Gloria, uh, I'll just say once and future wife of Lorena Gonzalez, I don't know what their relationship is these days, but he's the mayor of San Diego.

He r- he said, "San Diego is not collateral damage.

We're not expendable." Gosh, I think the lady doth protest too much.

Oh, it was just last week.

Um, that was a result, follow the, uh, follow the roster here, or the, uh, follow the dots.

David, do you remember Assembly Bill 218? That was Lorena Gonzalez.

We've already talked about her.

Well, there was also kind of a brushback from organized labor.

Lorena Gonzalez, you know, when Zolofkin released a video just before the election attacking Wahab for, I don't know if we want to go into it, but, you know, she declined to step aside so they could have a caretaker when Swalwell resigned.

And they had a kind of a, you know, they wanted to avoid an expensive, messy primary, which they ended up having.

So, you know, but I think to Guy's point, she's down to the incumbent and they're all about loyalty.

That would be Senate Bill 1331.

The bills all receive support and sponsorship from the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO Lorena Gonzalez, their president, said, These bills give an example of how we can begin to put guardrails on AI at work to ensure human control over this technology, limit surveillance, and put workers first.

Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, contrasted these bills against President Trump's embrace of AI business leaders.

Separately, but also included in this slate of bills, is a first-of-its-kind bill heavily regulating attorney use of AI, including... preventing attorneys from putting any personal or confidential in open access AI tools and requiring disclosure of any AI use in a brief.

[laughs] Oh, come on.

You are gonna try to take credit for everything that Elon Musk has created and produced because you tried to regulate him to death? Wasn't it his ally, Lorena Gonzalez, who told him to F off and move to Texas?

Texas?And he did, and California's been missing that money ever since.

Now, Gavin Newsom is making a pretty bold claim here.