Seyfarth Synopsis: PAGA reform was officially introduced in the state Assembly and Senate! The language of the bills were released detailing the most substantive changes to PAGA in its 20-year history, and Governor Newsom signed them into law on July 1, 2024. The bills have numerous provisions that benefit California employers, including imposing more restrictive standing requirements for plaintiffs, codifying the need for manageability of PAGA claims, and reforming the penalty structure, along with several other changes detailed below. On the evening of June 21, 2024, Assembly Bill 2288 and ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: On June 20, 2024, the first day of summer, the Cal/OSHA Standards Board turned the heat up on employers and unanimously voted to approve Cal/OSHA’s indoor heat rule. Employers should be prepared to comply with the rule as early as August 1, 2024.   After years of delay, the Cal/OSHA Standards Board unanimously adopted Cal/OSHA’s indoor heat illness prevention rule. Not wanting to be left in the dust, on June 21, Cal/OSHA published various guidance documents, including a model written program and FAQs on the new requirements, for California employers ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: PAGA reform has officially been introduced in the state Assembly and Senate! The language of the bills were released detailing the most substantive changes to PAGA in its 20-year history. The bills have numerous provisions that benefit California employers, including imposing more restrictive standing requirements for plaintiffs, codifying the need for manageability of PAGA claims, and reforming the penalty structure, along with several other changes detailed below. On the evening of June 21, 2024, Assembly Bill 2288 and Senate Bill 92 were introduced, collectively proposin ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: Are you ready for it? The record-smashing icon, Taylor Swift, may have taken her tour to Europe, but that doesn’t stop new laws from cropping up back home. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed the Fair Work Week Ordinance on April 9, 2024, which is set to go into effect on July 1, 2025, for retail employers located in the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. But we’ve seen this remix: it closely tracks the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Work Week Ordinance. Long Story Short Fair Work Week Ordinances have cropped up in almost as many locations as Taylor Swift ..read more

Update: On May 31, 2024, Governor Newsom passed S.B. 828, which delays implementation of S.B. 525, the health care minimum wage law signed by Governor Newsom on October 13, 2023. S.B. 828 delays all of the minimum wage adjustments in S.B. 525 by one month. This means that S.B. 525, which was set to take effect on June 1, 2024, will instead take effect on July 1, 2024. It further means that the minimum wage increases scheduled to take place after 2024 will take place on July 1, rather than June 1, of each year. Seyfarth Synopsis: On September 14, 2023, the California legislature passed S.B. 525 ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: California lawmakers have introduced legislation that would give employees the right to ignore communications from their employers that are received outside the contours of their “working hours,” which must first be agreed upon, in writing. If signed into law, AB 2751 would add a section to the Labor Code that would require employers to establish a workplace policy that would give employees the right to disconnect from employer communications during defined “nonworking hours.” Who Gets to Unplug? Under the newly proposed legislation, an employer may only contact a covered e ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: California healthcare employers are facing primetime levels of costly litigation alleging claims based on miscalculation of the regular rate of pay. Healthcare employers are often targets because non-exempt healthcare employees may be paid myriad different incentives—premiums, bonuses, differentials, on-call pay, and more—that may need to be included in the regular rate of pay, as we explain below. The regular rate of pay in the California healthcare system is about as easy to understand as the plot twists in Grey’s Anatomy. The regular rate of pay is at its core the produc ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis:  The reporting deadline for the 2023 California pay data reporting cycle is only six weeks away. Employers with at least 100 employees with at least one California employee must file their Pay Data Report with the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) by May 8, 2024.  While the reporting requirements are largely the same as the 2022 reporting requirements, the CRD now requires information on remote workers and labor contractor demographic data.  With California’s May 8, 2024, pay data reporting deadline right around the corner, California employers should ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: Senate Bill 553, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom, requires nearly all employers in the State of California to prepare a Workplace Violence Prevention Plan, train employees on how to identify and avoid workplace violence, and maintain a violent incident log by July 1, 2024. On March 7, 2024, Cal/OSHA published the long-awaited model Workplace Violence Prevention Plan. Governor Newsom has signed SB 553, a first of its kind workplace violence prevention law, which requires nearly all California employers to create, adopt, and implement written Workplace Violence Preve ..read more

Seyfarth Synopsis: With the new year right around the corner, California published updated FAQs on the state’s amended Paid Sick Leave Law, which goes into effect January 1, 2024. We’re here to break down the key insights and details of the FAQs so you can start 2024 off on the right foot, including compliance requirements for January 1, coordination with local ordinances, exemption information, and medical documentation guidelines. Out with the old, and ring in the new! Effective January 1, 2024, California’s amended Paid Sick Leave (“PSL”) law goes into effect. As detailed in our prior upda ..read more