California's largest state worker union says the California State Lottery has been sitting on legally required contact information for hundreds of its employees, and the union is accusing roughly 10 other state departments of doing the same thing. SEIU Local 1000 has now filed a formal unfair practice charge against the Lottery with the state's Public Employment Relations Board, arguing the missing data is choking off its ability to reach workers it represents.
The charge centers on a batch of employee records the Lottery handed over in late May. According to a report by the Sacramento Bee, the agency provided information for 698 employees but left out work locations and phone numbers for all of them, personal cell numbers for nearly 620 workers, and personal email addresses for 115 staffers. SEIU Local 1000 says it flagged the gaps to the Lottery in early June, but the agency never supplied a fix, prompting the union to escalate the dispute to PERB after what it describes as a failure to provide a remedy.
SEIU Local 1000 President Anica Walls said the Lottery's noncompliance is not an isolated incident. She said the agency failed to correct the problem even after being notified, and argued that repeated agency failures like this suggest a pattern of interference with workers' ability to communicate with their union and exercise their rights. Beyond the Lottery, the union has identified the California Department of Technology and the Department of Motor Vehicles as other agencies that failed to hand over required employee information.
What the Law Actually Requires
The obligation at the center of the dispute traces back to Assembly Bill 119, budget legislation signed in 2017 that created Government Code Sections 3555 through 3559. Those statutes require public employers to send unions contact information for new hires within 30 days of hire, according to research compiled by UPEC 792, along with a complete roster of represented employees every 120 days.
Those rosters are supposed to include more than names — the law spells out job titles, departments, work locations, home addresses, personal email addresses, and work, home, and personal cell phone numbers, per research from the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. California lawmakers built a specific carve-out for unions into the state's public records law: Government Code Section 6254.3 normally shields state employees' personal email addresses and home phone numbers from public disclosure, but it explicitly exempts recognized labor unions from that protection.
Why the Contact Lists Matter So Much
The stakes behind these rosters go back to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which barred mandatory fair-share fee collection from non-members of public sector unions. Research from the Center for American Progress notes that the ruling left unions like SEIU Local 1000 entirely dependent on voluntary opt-in membership, making direct contact with every represented worker essential to recruitment, outreach, and dues authorization.
That makes the current dispute more than a paperwork squabble. SEIU Local 1000 represents roughly 96,000 California state civil service employees spread across nine bargaining units, according to the California Legislative Analyst's Office, covering everyone from clerical staff and nurses to IT specialists and custodians — roughly half of the state's rank-and-file workforce. Walls took over as the union's president in July 2024 after two terms as its vice president for organizing and representation.
An Administrative Gap Between CalHR and the Departments
Angela Musallam, a spokesperson for the California Department of Human Resources, declined to comment on the pending litigation, the state worker report from the Bee's Corey Schmidt noted. That silence highlights an awkward structural wrinkle in how the state handles these disputes: under the Ralph C. Dills Act, CalHR's director acts as the Governor's official representative in labor negotiations, even though individual departments like the Lottery, DMV, and Department of Technology independently hold and manage their own personnel records.
That division of responsibility creates real enforcement gaps, since CalHR sets statewide labor policy while day-to-day compliance with contact-sharing rules falls to each department on its own. If PERB ultimately sustains the union's charge, the board has authority to order the Lottery to cease and desist, post a public notice of the violation, and immediately turn over the missing contact information.
Part of a Bigger Standoff Over Office Mandates
The contact-information fight is unfolding against the backdrop of a broader clash between Governor Gavin Newsom's administration and state worker unions. Newsom's return-to-office order now requires state employees to work in person four days a week starting July 1, 2026, up from two days in 2024, and SEIU Local 1000 has organized multiple rallies at the Capitol opposing it — protests that, according to Hoodline's coverage of a new Capitol Mall cafe betting on the return-to-office crowd, have become a regular fixture near the Capitol.
The union has also pursued the fight through the Legislature. Assemblymember Alex Lee introduced Assembly Bill 1729 earlier this year, a union-backed bill that would force state agencies to publish telework savings data and provide written justification before mandating in-person work, a measure Hoodline covered in February as part of the broader telework standoff. Whether CalHR will eventually step in with centralized guidance to force departmental compliance on the contact-sharing rules, or whether the matter is left to PERB to resolve agency by agency, remains an open question.
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