United States: Other Employment-Related Bills Awaiting Action By California Governor

SB 358: The California Fair Pay Act is directed at closing the pay differential between male and female employees, and is reported to be the toughest equal pay law in the country. For further information, please see our August 2015 FEB.

SB 406: This bill would expand the purposes for which family care leave may be taken under the California Family Rights Act ("CFRA"). First, it would broaden the group of people for whom an employee may take family care leave to include the following relatives with a serious health condition: parent-in-law, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, domestic partner, child of a domestic partner, and adult child regardless of dependent status. Second, it would eliminate an employer's right to limit the amount of CFRA child bonding leave to a combined total of twelve weeks where both parents work for the same employer, such that parents in this context could collectively take up to twenty-four weeks of protected leave.

AB 1017: The bill would create a new Labor Code statute prohibiting employers from seeking salary history information about an employment applicant. As originally drafted, the bill would have also prohibited employers from releasing salary information of current and former employers, but a late amendment deleted the restriction.

AB 1506: The bill would amend the California Private Attorney Generals Act ("PAGA") statutes to allow employers a limited window to cure certain wage statement deficiencies before a PAGA action may be pursued. Specifically, it allows employers thirty-three days to cure a violation pertaining to the inclusive dates for the pay period and the name and address of the employer. Such a cure must result in fully-compliant statements for the entire statutory, three-year period, and may be used only once in a one-year period.

SB 579: This bill would expand the purposes for which employees may use certain legally-mandated time off. First, under the Family-School Partnership Act, employers with at least twenty-five employees must allow employees to take up to forty hours of unpaid time off annually (up to eight hours per month) to participate in school and childcare activities. Under the bill, employees could use the job-protected time (a) to find, enroll or reenroll their children in school or licensed daycare and (b) for a childcare provider or school emergency, including where the facility requests the child be picked up or policy prevents the child's attendance, behavioral or discipline problems, unplanned closure or unexpected unavailability, or a natural disaster. The protections would be extended to stepparents, foster parents or an employee who stands in loco parentis to a child. Second, the bill would also more closely align California's "kin care" law, under which employees may use one-half of their accrued sick leave to care for defined family members, to mirror the defined family members and purposes of the recent Paid Sick Leave law (see June 2015 FEB).

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