What Happens in California

...isn't strictly my business, but this logic is striking.

The point of collective bargaining was, you might recall, that it would increase worker salaries. Here we see the governor denying firefighters a raise so that their union can try to get them a raise. He clearly thinks binding them to the union process will keep them on the reservation; if he cared about their salary,  which was the whole point of collective bargaining to begin with, he'd just give them the raise that the legislature had already approved.