California Legislature in Final Week of Legislative Session

The California Legislature is in the final full week of its current legislative session, and there are several high-priority bills in which CLFP is engaged, including employee leave, packaging recycling and workers compensation for COVID-19 cases. Once the Legislature adjourns on August 31, Governor Gavin Newsom has until October 1 to sign or veto legislation sent to his desk.

Job-Protected Employee Leave
Governor Newsom has made it clear that job-protected employee leave is a priority of his Administration. Senate Bill 1383 (Jackson) has become the vehicle for the Governor’s proposal.  The bill expands the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) to provide job-protected leave to additional workers. Specifically, it extends CFRA’s medical and family leave protections through the following policy changes:

  • Requires an employer with at least five employees (rather than at least 50 employees) to grant an employee request to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family care and medical leave if the employee has had 180 days of service with the employer.

  • Provides CFRA leave protections for employees to care for additional types of family members, including domestic partners, children of domestic partners, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings and parents-in-law.
CLFP and a large business coalition argue that SB 1383 is not limited in scope to only address COVID-19 and will place a significant burden on employers at a time when they can least afford it. Now is not the time to be placing such burdens on employers who are struggling to reopen and rebuild. Further, this bill would result in costly litigation if employers make a mistake in implementing this leave through a new private right of action.

Packaging Recycling
Senate Bill 54 and Assembly Bill 1080 are mirror bills that would require single-use plastic packaging to be recyclable and compostable by 2030 as well as require onerous new recycling rates to be met. These bills stalled at the end of last session and are now roaring back to life as the Legislature approaches final adjournment on August 31.

CLFP and a large coalition have argued that these bills would create unprecedented product regulation in California that will increase the cost to manufacture and ship consumer products sold in California. The bills 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. The coalition also argues that the mandates would impose an unrealistic compliance time frame that fails to address California’s lack of recycling and composting infrastructure.

Further, CLFP and the coalition argue that the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic are far from over, and the current framework of these bills will have significant impacts on both consumers and businesses – undoubtedly raising costs for all Californians for items we continue to rely on to protect ourselves. For some businesses, the single-use products and single-use packaging covered by these bills are critical to their livelihood. With less than a week left in the legislative session and significant work necessary to produce sound policy, CLFP and the coalition are imploring legislators to prevent the passage of AB 1080 or SB 54.

Workers Compensation for COVID-19
Several bills have been recently introduced that would require employers to provide workers compensation benefits to employees who become infected with COVID-19, regardless of where they contracted it. Senate Bill 1159 (Hill) has been identified as the “compromise measure.” SB 1159 would codify Governor Newsom’s Executive Order N-62-20 and establish workers’ compensation presumptions for COVID-19 infections that would be effective only after the expiration date of Executive Order N-62-20.
When the Executive Order was issued by Governor Newsom the entire state was subject to a shelter-in-place order; except essential workers including those in our processing plants. Those workers were clearly subject to a higher risk for contracting COVID-19 because they were, for purposes of their employment, the only Californians not actively sheltering in place. California is no longer subject to that order, and with society generally open, there is no longer any basis to “presume” an airborne, community-spread illness was acquired at work.

California has issued detailed guidance about when businesses may open and specific safety protocols they must follow in order to safely remain open. Given the current California Department of Public Health (CDPH) and CalOSHA guidance and requirements, companies have and will continue to invest massively in procedures, training, equipment, and facility modifications to protect their employees. Given all the steps companies have taken since March, workplaces are more controlled from a virus prevention perspective than many of the other places a worker may visit.

Unfortunately, SB 1159 does not recognize this and presumes that, should a worker become infected with COVID-19, employers have created an unsafe workspace despite all of the safety measures taken. Since more than three-quarters of an employee’s time is spent outside work, even for those working full time, there is no rational basis for a presumption of work contagion.

The presumption policy proposed by SB 1159 would cause the workers’ compensation system to absorb an unknown number of COVID-19 infections that were not work-related, which will be very costly for companies. The Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) has issued their “Cost Evaluation of Potential Conclusive COVID-19 Presumption in California” and cites an approximate mid-range cost estimate of $11.2 billion, or a 61% increase in the cost of California’s worker’s compensation system (already the second most expensive in the country). This estimate doesn’t apply to this specific proposal. However, we believe that the WCIRB is working on a new cost estimate for SB 1159.

By Trudi Hughes, CLFP Government Affairs Director