COVID-19 Delays Return of California Legislature

The California Legislature began its summer break on July 2 with a scheduled return date of July 13. However, due to legislators and legislative staff being exposed and/or testing positive for COVID-19, legislative leadership moved the return date to July 27. This date leaves only five weeks for the Legislature to consider and pass bills by final adjournment on August 31. Despite the tight time frame, a number of problematic bills are still making their way through the legislative process. CLFP is actively engaged in all of these measures as well as others that would impact food processing in California.

Employer Mandates
Right before the summer break, the Senate passed legislation that significantly burdens employers by requiring they provide eligible employees with 12 weeks of mandatory family leave, which can be taken in increments of one to two hours, and threatens employers with costly litigation if they make any mistake in implementing the leave.

A pending COVID-19 employment leave bill and an expanded bereavement leave bill would create more litigation exposure for employers if passed by the Legislature.
Another proposed bill that is still moving ahead would create a headcount tax of $275 per employee as a way to fill state budget gaps. If passed, the measure would punish employers who create jobs and discourage hiring and employment growth.

Yet another measure would grant expansive authority to the state of California to dictate the operations and performance standards of employees at warehouse distribution centers, increase hourly rates of pay, impose new mandatory break periods and expose employers to layers of penalty and costly litigation under the Private Attorney General Act (PAGA), which will severely limit these employers’ ability to expand their workforce or increase employee benefits.

Additionally, two workers’ compensation bills create an extremely concerning precedent for expanding into the private sector a costly “conclusive presumption” that certain workers contracted COVID-19 in the workplace.

Unprecedented Product Regulation in California
A proposal from the last legislative session is likely to be considered again before the end of this session, which would substantially increase the cost to manufacture and ship consumer products sold in California. The proposal would provide CalRecycle with broad authority to develop and impose costly and unrealistic new mandates on manufacturers of all single-use packaging and certain single-use plastic consumer products under an unrealistic compliance time frame that fails to address California’s lack of recycling and composting infrastructure.

By Trudi Hughes, CLFP Government Affairs Director. You can contact Trudi at trudi@clfp.com