Bill on AI bosses hopes to avoid second veto

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Hello and welcome back to Capitol Confidential! 

Today is the deadline for any and all amendments to bills – a cutoff that has dominated much of the Legislature’s work and attention over the past week. As a result, the brunt of the end of session will fall on the final seven days leading up to Monday, Aug. 31, when the two-year legislative session officially ends at midnight. Yes, that includes next weekend. Staffers I spoke to this week tell me they’re planning for back-to-back late nights (and already booking their post-session celebrations and spa days). 

It may only be a week, but the amount of legislation on the docket is sure to make it feel like the longest seven days of the year.

There’s roughly 1,000 bills to get through, plus an expected eleventh-hour legislative package pushed by the governor to tackle the state’s wildfire recovery programs and potentially place a cap on utilities’ wildfire liability. 

As we gear up for next week’s floor session marathon, here’s some of the legislative news we’re keeping an eye on. 

Imagine this scenario: Your bosses pull you in for a meeting to talk about your job performance. Your direct manager, Luna, who oversees the gift store you work at in San Francisco noted you’ve been late for several shifts recently, in violation of policy. The twist? Luna is an AI agent, and it was her analysis of your shift data that led her to recommend you be fired. 

No, this is not a hypothetical situation – it actually happened recently – and has refocused attention on the burgeoning issue around so-called AI robobosses in the workplace.

While the store, Andon Market, is an explicitly AI-run operation billed as an experiment, many worker advocates worry AI-led firings could become far more widespread. They’re backing a bill in the Legislature that would place limits on robobosses.

Senate Bill 947 from Sen. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, would place new restrictions on the use of automated decision making systems, requiring both the disclosure of their use and mandate human review when the decision to discipline or fire an employee is primarily based on automated decision-making systems, or ADS, which commonly use AI. The measure passed the Senate in June and cleared a key hurdle in the Assembly last week.

“Nobody wants to be fired by a machine,” McNerney said. “Not without human beings at least looking at that record, at what grievances caused that separation.”

Along with requiring human oversight of ADS personnel decisions, McNerney’s bill would also require employers to disclose when the technology is used and what data they fed into the systems. 

The biggest opponent of the bill, the California Chamber of Commerce, included it on its list of “cost-drivers” it is opposing in the Legislature this year, calling the requirements “impractical” and warning it will discourage the use of ADS tools. The business advocacy group said it could lead to costly penalties for businesses, as the bill would allow for state-led civil cases against offenders and carry a $500 fine for employers found to have violated the law.

The bill is sponsored by the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO. The federation’s president, Lorena Gonzalez said there need to be restrictions on how employers can use artificial intelligence to discipline and fire workers, grouping it alongside a handful of other AI regulation bills the labor organization is supporting this session.

“This is the new frontier, and we need to get ahead of so many issues that AI can cause in the workplace,” Gonzalez told the Chronicle. “California has always been on the forefront of worker protection, but does that all get thrown out the window because a computer’s making these decisions?”

The bill, along with many others, is headed to the Assembly for final votes next week. McNerney said he’s confident it will make it out of the Legislature; the real question is whether Gov. Gavin Newsom will give it the green light. Newsom vetoed a similar bill from McNerney last year. 

Lawmakers in both houses this week passed a Senate resolution declaring their support for permanent standard time – that is, nixing Daylight Saving Time. 

SCR7, authored by Sen. Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, passed both chambers with a majority vote this week. It proclaims changing the clocks is “disruptive to health, safety, education, and the economy,” and asserts support for California to observe permanent standard time. 

It was nowhere near a unanimous show of support, though, with more than two dozen lawmakers in both chambers choosing to sit out the vote. But it is a notable read on how many members of the Legislature feel about the issue as Congress and the administration consider making Daylight Saving Time permanent. 

The House passed a bill to impose year-round Daylight Saving Time last month, but it’s unclear how it will fare in the Senate. President Donald Trump has urged Senate Republicans to support the bill, but movement has stalled over the past week. 

Here in California, a surprisingly bipartisan collection of state lawmakers recently voted to stake out their own position in the fight between daylight saving and standard time. 

California’s congressional delegation largely supported the measure: All eight Republican members voted yes, while the Democrats split 33-9.

If Congress passes the Sunshine Act, state legislatures across the country will have to proactively opt out. In California, it’s not entirely clear if that would end up happening. After all, Californians voted in 2018 to give the Legislature the power to switch to permanent standard time, signaling a level of public support for a future without the practice of ’springing forward’ or ‘falling back.’

On Tuesday, Sen. Aisha Wahab, D-Hayward, bid farewell to her Senate colleagues in a personal floor speech. By the end of the day on Thursday, she won in the special election to serve the remainder of former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s congressional term. 

Wahab’s defeat of BART Board President Melissa Hernandez came by a much smaller margin of victory than she received in two primaries this summer.

Hernandez gained tremendous ground after pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC dumped $6.3 million of negative ads and mailers against Wahab. That’s several times as much as Hernandez raised on her own through June 30, according to campaign finance disclosures, the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli reported. 

Wiener’s conversion therapy bill lands on Newsom’s desk — with a twist 

From the Chronicle’s Raheem Hosseini: 

Don’t call it a retreat.

California lawmakers just sent Newsom a bill intended to insulate the state’s conversion therapy ban from a Supreme Court ruling that threw such bans into legal jeopardy.

But the bill, SB934 from Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, no longer has the sharp enforcement teeth that it originally did. And the LGBTQ coalition behind it says there’s a good reason for that.

First, a refresher: Back in March, a supermajority of the Supreme Court ruled that a Colorado ban against licensed counselors trying to change children’s sexual orientations or gender identities violated a Christian therapist’s religious speech. Every major medical and psychological association and an overwhelming body of research says that so-called conversion therapy is ineffective and psychologically harmful. The court’s 8-1 decision zeroed in on the issue of “viewpoint neutrality” — i.e., did Colorado’s ban and others like it favor LGBTQ identities over straight, cisgender ones? — and instantly threatened California’s landmark ban passed in 2011.

In preparation for the widely expected ruling, Wiener and a coalition of LGBTQ groups check-raised the court by expanding survivors’ ability to file malpractice lawsuits against the mental health practitioners who tried to change them as kids.

But, according to National Center for LGBTQ Rights legal director Shannon Mintner and Wiener spokesperson Erik Mebust, the bill’s backers decided that their priority really needed to be protecting California’s ban before expanding on it.

“The coalition realized that we need to focus on sending a very clear and strong message that California is committed to preserving its protection of LGBTQ youth and their families,” Minter, whose San Francisco-based organization helped draft the state’s original law, said in a text. “We do want to strengthen survivors’ ability to bring cases, and we intend to do that in the near future. But we realized that requires more education and we didn’t want to delay in updating the existing law — that is so critical.”

SB934 now seeks to achieve viewpoint neutrality by (re)defining “sexual orientation change efforts” as any mental health services that “direct a patient toward a predetermined sexual orientation or gender identity,” which could mean trying to convince a gay kid they’re straight or vice versa.

The updated definition, similar to the one Colorado approved after the Chiles decision, is meant to withstand the Supreme Court’s guidance and show the roughly 20 other states that followed in California’s footsteps “how to update their existing protections,” Minter said.

Questions? Thoughts? Interesting tidbits to share? Reach out at [email protected], and follow me on X, @KathrynPlmr.