As the Legislature reconvenes this week for its final month of business for the 2015-2016 legislative session, NFIB California reflected on victories and challenges ahead per the “The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly” bill list. Bills included in this list represent those which will have the greatest impact, either negative or positive, to our 22,000 small businesses across California.
As we enter these final four weeks of the legislative session, NFIB is prepared to hit the ground running to ensure the voice and interests of our 22,000 small business members, and their hundreds of thousands of employees, are heard regarding our remaining priority issues.
NFIB was proud to help stop a handful of ugly bills such as SB 878 (Leyva), the Predictive Scheduling Mandate, and SB 1161 (Allen), the ‘California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act’ so far this year. However, several bad bills remain alive and we are prepared to put forth every effort to protect small business in these final weeks.
Environmental mandates, transportation taxes, protected family leave, and agricultural workers’ mandates are some of our top policy concerns as the legislature wraps up this two-year session. Given the current lack of transparency in the legislature, it is impossible to know every issue that will be brought up since bills can, and will, be gutted-and-amended without notice to the public.
AB 2757 (Gonzalez), which mandates overtime pay for agricultural employees, is a perfect example: this bill died on the Assembly Floor months ago, but has resurfaced in the form of AB 1066 without full committee scrutiny.
In the first half of the legislative session, we witnessed how swiftly the Legislature can ram through devastating public policy with the enactment of Senate Bill 3 (Leno), which increased the state minimum wage to $15 per hour. Therefore, our 22,000 members will be highly engaged and informed on these policy issues with a regularly updated ‘The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly’ bill list.
Currently, the list includes 39 bills total (23 active): 14 good (5 active); 7 bad (6 active); and 18 ugly (12 active). This list reflects proposals from the 2015-2016 legislative session, and as new bills are introduced or morphed into substantively new bills, this list will be updated. You can always find the current version at http://www.nfib.com/ca/gbu.