(January 31, 2022) Five California Chamber of Commerce job killer bills face an important deadline today and must pass out of their house of origin to continue moving through the Legislative process.

Job Killer Bills

The job killer bills expected to be decided on are:

• AB 995 (Lorena Gonzalez; D-San Diego): Imposes new costs and leave requirements on employers of all sizes, by expanding the number of paid sick days employers are required to provide, which is in addition to all of the recently enacted leave mandates (COVID-19 sick leave, Cal/OSHA emergency paid time off, California Family Rights Act leave, workers’ compensation, etc.) that small employers throughout the state are already struggling with to implement and comply.
• AB 1001 (Cristina Garcia; D-Los Angeles): Creates new highly subjective, non-quantifiable and litigation-bait standards in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) that will threaten California’s economic recovery and ability to construct much-needed housing. It also removes local government discretion regarding how to analyze and mitigate proposed project impacts, thereby making projects more expensive, harder to build and more likely to be thrown into courts by NIMBY opposition.
• AB 1192 (Kalra; D-San Jose): Places new onerous administrative burdens on employers by requiring them to publish extensive, private salary and benefit information on the Labor and Workforce Development Agency’s website. Public disclosure of completely lawful policies and conduct could give the false impression of wage disparity where none may exist and subjects employers to frivolous litigation and settlement demands.
• AB 1400 (Kalra; D-San Jose): Penalizes employers, eliminates individual choice, and results in hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes on all Californians and California businesses by creating a new single-payer government-run, multibillion-dollar health care system.
• SB 213 (Cortese; D-San Jose): Significantly increases workers’ compensation costs for public and private hospitals by presuming certain diseases and injuries are caused by the workplace and establishes an extremely concerning precedent for expanding presumptions into the private sector.

Oppose Bills

Six CalChamber-opposed bills also face this house of origin deadline and must pass out of the Assembly or Senate:

• AB 416 (Kalra; D-San Jose): Requires any companies submitting bids for state procurement contracts involving a range of common goods, including wood, rubber, paper, and others, to adopt new internal policies regarding sourcing of materials for all contracts, not just state-related contracts, and provide potentially proprietary information regarding their supply chain to the state as part of the application process.
• AB 257 (Holden; D-Pasadena): Undermines the existence of the franchise model by holding franchisors responsible for all conduct by individual franchisees. Establishes Fast Food Sector Council that would have unprecedented authority to write its own labor and employment laws for fast food restaurant employees, circumventing the California Legislature and other regulatory agencies’ position in establishing such laws.
• AB 854 (Lee; D-San Jose): Upends the Ellis Act and property rights by forcing rental property owners to stay in business even when they can no longer afford to stay landlords, interferes with a family’s ability to move into their own property and creates an arbitrary 5-year restriction on an owner’s ability to move into their own property.
• AB 1218 (McCarty; D-Sacramento): Imposes a “feebate” structure on manufacturers, which has the effect of increasing the cost of all vehicles in a manufacturer’s fleet, including the cost of light duty vehicles used by commercial and industrial businesses.
• SB 582 (Stern; D-Canoga Park): Threatens substantial increases in the cost of goods and services of entities subject to cap-and-trade by doubling our 2030 carbon emissions reduction goals.
• SB 342 (Lena Gonzalez; D-Long Beach): Seeks to expand board membership and imposes limitations on the types of appointees to the local air districts.