Gutless Amenders in California’s Legislature

In 2019, the California Legislature passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill called AB 5, a dream of big labor’s but a nightmare for freelance/contract workers.

In 2020, Newsom signed AB 2257, lifting some requirements for some of the impacted workers and occupations.

Possibly better, but the exemptions still left out hundreds of occupations, like nurses, pharmacists, paralegals, etc. and still worse than before AB 5.

In 2023, the California legislature passed and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that created a “fast food council” and set a $20 industry minimum wage, a hike that was to take effect in a few days.

But just days ago, Newsom signed AB 610, exempting a whole swath (separate from his Panera Bread gift basket in the original bill) of fast food establishments – based on their location –  from the bill.

The exemptions cover fast food restaurants in airports, hotels, event centers, theme parks, museums, gambling establishments, corporate campus cafeterias, and publicly owned lands including ports, piers, beaches and parks concessions – not just from the $20 an hour minimum wage starting April 2024, but also from the new Fast Food Council, which the Globe has reported on as government expansion and control.

Possibly better, but still worse than before the blatantly anti-worker (thousands have already or will soon lose their jobs because of the wage hike) AB 610.

So, two California “progressive worker’s paradise” grabbed happy lefty headlines, made some people not directly impacted by the bills feel good by “helping the little people,” and then were almost instantaneously changed.

Was it truly caring for workers or truly burnishing their progressive bona fides that drove the bills – get the headline, say you’ve done something good, and then have no problem with creating exemptions that may or not have been promised in advance to said bills. 

This may be an incorrect statement, but just because a person works at an airport does not mean their overall cost of living – remember, the fast food bill was all about a “living wage” – is automatically 30% less than the person who works at the same Arby’s a mile away.

And while politicians are not know for the adamantine ethical stances, if one truly believed in either or both bills, why would they accept any changes, anyway?

The two “clean up” bills also have something else in common – they were both “gut and amend” bills.

See a pattern?

California is one of the very few states in the nation that allows a bill for, say, no-fee animal shelter pet adoptions for the elderly, to pass its way through the legislative process for a few months and then, at the last minute, to be amended to make it about, say, doubling the unemployment tax rate.

In the case of AB2257, it wound its way through committee approvals and to the floor as a bill to impose a certain base tax on limited liability corporations, a completely unrelated subject. In fact, calling the bill “amended” is a bit of stretch of the definition of “amend” as every single line, sentence, word, and punctuation mark in the original bill was removed and simply replaced with entirely new language.

AB 610’s provenance is actually a bit sad:  the bill was originally introduced by Asm. Chris Holden (D) and was about a grant program so kids in school could get free public transit passes. Holden even still has the press release announcing its introduction on his website.

Here is a screenshot of it:

It made it until last September, when it was then placed in the inactive file with the same bus pass language. But, on January 29, 2024 – a month or so before Gavin’s Panera Problem – Holden revived it as the fast food exemptions bill.  Words in, words, out, urgency exemption attached, and two months later it’s law.

The processes these bills took raise rather troubling questions. Did either – or both – bills get signed with promises of future carve-outs?  In other words, if you give me the political props now we’ll make sure you’re taken care of later, before the bill actually takes effect – that feat was accomplished by a few days, in the case of the fast food workers.

Even more troublingly, this would seem to give the Sacramento lobbyists/regulator/utterly beholden electeds blob an extra bite at the apple, as it were.  Well, donate (or pay) now and I’ll see if I can get you in the first bill (AB5 originally had 65 exemptions) but if that doesn’t work out we can try again – if you donate/pay again – in the “clean-up” bill.

Both bills were targeted to please one very large powerful constituency – big labor – and big labor got both bills, so what’s it to them if they get a little haircut – they win either way.

As do the people behind the bills.

Lorena Gonzalez – AB 5’s primary backer while she was a legislator is now California Labor Federation chief – in fact, she quit the legislature after the bill passed and before her term expired to take the job (and, possibly, to marry the haplessly awful San Diego pol hack Nathan Fletcher.)

The chief enforcer – and helpful editor – of AB 5 was then state labor secretary Julie Su.

President Joe Biden has heaped praise on AB 5 and now Su is the federal Acting Secretary of Labor and has codified her own “AB 5-lite” regulation at the national level, apparently hoping to replicate the gutting of the freelancer/independent contractor labor universe that took place here across the country. 

And gut it did – studies show that in California AB 5 led to a 10.5% decrease in self-employment and overall unemployment increased by 4.4% in the professions targeted by the bill.

As for the fast food bill, Newsom definitely burnishes his national big labor standing and the other five dozen or so /democratic electeds in Sacramento keep that labor money tap flowing.

And Bonus! The amount of money unions will have to splash around Sacramento will increase as a result of both bills.  AB 5 was meant to force freelancers to become employees – freelancers can’t be unionized, employees can. And the state “fast food council”  – a “Soviet National Department of Smelting and Oppression”-type agency – will, along with the higher wages (but fewer workers as thousands have already been or will soon be laid off in the industry,) gain far more power than they already have.

So it’s a win-win for Sacramento and big labor.  Everybody else?  Tough – what are going to, vote us out?