Last week’s adjournment by the Oregon legislature marked the end of the road for SEIU 503’s “top priority bill” of the 2025 session, House Bill (HB) 3838, when the measure ultimately failed to make it out of committee in the face of stiff opposition and questions surrounding possible misconduct by the union officials promoting it.
A brazen power grab by SEIU 503, the bill would have created a statewide “workforce standards board” granting union leaders and their allies in elected office sweeping authority to dictate wages, benefits and other employment standards for Oregon’s home- and community-based healthcare workers and their employers.
While SEIU 503 currently represents certain Medicaid-paid care providers unionized under the state’s public employee collective bargaining laws, the union has made comparatively few inroads into Oregon’s private-sector care industry. As the Freedom Foundation pointed out in its written testimony opposing the bill, HB 3838 was an effort to do just that — undoubtedly driven in large part by the union’s diminished membership and dues revenue among public and “partial-public” employees after multiple U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirmed they can no longer be forced to pay union dues or fees.
A clear signal of SEIU 503’s intent to grow its influence in the private sector, the workforce standards board sought by HB 3838 are also the sort of “sectoral bargaining” scheme to which SEIU leaders and the bill’s other leftist proponents have long been ideologically attracted precisely because they believe they can be used to “increase union membership” among workers who are “inherently hard to organize.”
Thankfully, a coalition of opponents quickly recognized the union’s attempt to seize control of Oregon’s private-sector care industry through legislative decree rather than legitimate support from the workers the union seeks to represent. Though SEIU 503 leaders lobbied aggressively for the legislation, it faced significant backlash from a wide range of stakeholders, including industry associations, business owners, the Freedom Foundation and even SEIU’s own sublocal representing adult foster care providers.
Even so, Democrats advanced HB 3838 out of two different House committees along party lines before the bill ran out of steam and finally ground to a halt in the Joint Committee on Ways and Means during the final days of the session.
Adding to the bill’s controversy was a last-minute ethics complaint filed by House Republican leaders in late June alleging that SEIU 503 knowingly misrepresented constituent support to lawmakers when it distributed approximately 1,000 postcards expressing support for the bill by individual care workers.
According to the complaint, some of the postcards were falsely attributed to individuals who actually opposed HB 3838, including those who even publicly testified against the bill.
Oregon law strictly prohibits lobbyists from making false statements or misrepresentations to legislative officials. Earlier this year, the Freedom Foundation filed a similar complaint against a lobbyist for the Oregon Education Association (OEA) after the lobbyist misrepresented the Freedom Foundation’s outreach material for the purpose of supporting another piece of union-backed legislation, HB 3789.
Ultimately, the scandal surrounding SEIU 503’s motives for and handling of HB 3838 proved to be too much this year, even for Democrats.
There’s little doubt the union’s leaders will bring back their “top priority” in future sessions. But with this year’s failure and a potential ethics violation on their permanent record, we can only hope it will be that much harder when they inevitably try again.
