Former Governor of Arizona and CEO of Citizens for Free Enterprise, Doug Ducey, spoke with National Review about a California union’s attempts to bully one of Arizona’s largest and most iconic employers, putting thousands of jobs at risk.
Below you will find excerpts from the article, which can be viewed in its entirety here.
National Review: A Homegrown Arizona Company Was About to Break Ground on a Billion-Dollar Development — Then a California Union Stepped In
Brittany Bernstein
3/23/2025
Axon has proposed a $1.3 billion development that would include a new headquarters for the company, along with some 1,900 apartments and condominiums, a 425-room hotel, and seven restaurant spaces.
The new HQ would bring up to 5,500 new jobs to Arizona, drive $38 billion of economic impact over the next ten years, and generate more than $2 billion in tax revenue, according to an independent analysis cited by Axon.
But Unite Here Local 11 and local anti-development advocates have stepped in to send the city council-approved plan to a ballot referendum after Axon refused to be forced into unionization, the company says. Unite Here Local 11 represents tens of thousands of hotel, restaurant and airport workers in California and Arizona.
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Data shows the union has supplied muscle to the small but vocal contingent that opposes the project. Unite Here’s political arm, Worker Power, has contributed more than $21,000 to TAAZE, city campaign finance reports show.
Ninety-five percent of the funding for the anti-development effort came from a dark money group called Public Integrity Alliance, 90 percent of which was donated labor, in the form of signature gatherers.
Just 7 percent of signatures for the referendum were gathered by volunteers, while the remaining 93 percent were collected by paid signature gatherers. Two-thirds of the signature gatherers came from out of state.
In Arizona, which is a right to work state, unions see an opportunity to go to major employers looking to get a big project through the zoning and approvals process and essentially force employers into unionization agreements via a weaponization of the referendum process.
If the union can kill the Axon project and replicate the pattern several more times, “people are going to have to sign off on these unionization agreements or take the high probability that the weaponization of this process will kill their project,” Smith said.
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“Big Unions from California shouldn’t be able to chase critical employers out of Arizona simply because a company won’t meet specific demands,” former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey told National Review. “Axon has only ever called Arizona home and the focus should be on helping our employers create more high-wage jobs and increase economic revenue, not derailing projects already approved by the Scottsdale City Council.”
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Arizona and California are two of only ten states that explicitly allow similar zoning challenges by referendum — unlike red states associated with rapid growth in recent years, like Florida and Texas.