VIEWPOINTS
Regulating the Workplace
Orange County’s Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine, and state Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Santa Ana, are tangling again over a business issue,this time, the new Dunn-authored workplace bill. We excerpted Campbell’s piece from his weekly e-mail missive, and invited Dunn to respond.
Stopping Extortion
By John Campbell
AB 2181, which I authored, proposed to repeal the miserable SB 796, authored last year by Sen. Dunn, D-Santa Ana, which has become known as the “bounty hunter bill.” This bill created a right for any employee or former employee to sue their employer for any discrepancy from the 2,400-page labor code. They do not have to show any harm. The “violation” could be technical. But the “damages” are set in statute as a multiple of the number of employees you have and the time over which the “violation” occurred. This formula results in very substantial fines and the attorneys and the plaintiff get 25% of that fine.
Thousand Oaks-based Amgen Inc. has been sued for tens of millions of dollars for posting a sign in the wrong font size and for having a poster not be “conspicuous.” Seven movie production companies have been sued for millions by one law firm and the same four plaintiffs (some of who worked for as little as 12.5 hours for any one studio) on the same day for “overtime violations.” These overtime violations amount to as little as $8.63, but SB 796 allows the fine and the attorney’s fees to potentially be millions.
This bill is a trial lawyer’s dream and a taxpayer’s nightmare. But the governor’s bill to repeal this law (and two other similar Republican bills) received no Democrat votes in committee.
The bill does not apply just to businesses. It applies to any employer. That means school districts and churches and charities can and will be next. Or maybe the Legislature. After the committee hearing, a state labor workforce expert and I roamed the Capitol for about an hour and discovered violations by the Legislature that would result in fines of $249 million. For example, there were no current inspection certificates posted in the 12 elevators in the building,a potential $62 million “bounty.”
Any wonder that the trial lawyers and their subsidiary senator Joe Dunn love this legalized extortion?
If any of you readers knows of lawsuits that have been filed under this law, please contact me with the details. Leave out the employer’s name if you want. These examples will give the governor more leverage to get this law repealed, with retroactivity, before it destroys more businesses, impacts schools and kills more jobs.
Protecting Workers
By Joe Dunn
California farm workers forced to eat pesticide-laden grapes as part of their jobs. Proper scaffolding not used in the construction of a building. Workers not being paid overtime, or their regular wages, when they should be paid.
Where is the California Department of Industrial Relations to stop these practices? Underfunded and understaffed.
That’s why the recent fiscal crisis in state government necessitated our looking at an alternative way of enforcing state labor laws. Rather than spending taxpayer dollars on enforcement of egregious labor law violations, we privatized that enforcement. Isn’t it ironic that those who tout privatizing state work as a cure-all suddenly balk when it comes to the enforcement of labor law violations?
But that’s exactly what Senate Bill 796 does. It addresses labor law enforcement in California, which has fallen drastically behind the growth of the labor force. We have only 14 more enforcement staff positions than there were 16 years ago, yet the state has more than 3 million more workers. As a result of the state’s ongoing budget crisis, the governor last year issued an executive order calling for the elimination of 710 positions at the Department of Industrial Relations, roughly 140 of whom are in enforcement.
SB 796 is not anti-business. Workers and the overwhelming majority of honest employers need a defense against unscrupulous employers.
Under SB 796, only aggrieved employees may bring actions and only on behalf of themselves or other aggrieved employees. An SB 796 claim cannot be brought on behalf of the general public or even on behalf of another aggrieved employee if the plaintiff has not been harmed.
Discussions currently are under way with business groups to ensure that trivial issues,e.g., the font size of worker notices,do not fall under the auspices of SB 796. I fully expect those discussions to be successful and the majority of the arguments of the opponents of this bill will go away. It will not remove the opposition of those who don’t believe employees should have any rights or of certain “Johnny-come-lately” politicians who are trying to politicize this discussion. Their game-playing may spell defeat for the effort to improve SB 796.
California needs both a healthy business climate and protections for workers. These two goals are not mutually exclusive. In fact, together they constitute the very essence of the American dream.
