Posted on June 28th, 2021
Below find a complete transcript of this video.
What’s up fellow entrepreneurs today. I want to talk about something called Senate bill 93. Now this bill requires certain employers to rehire hire former employees based on seniority, but first, before we get into it as always, I’m a lawyer, but I’m not your lawyer. So please seek out competent legal advice for your particular question or problem.
Now, this statute is certainly an overreach by California, California is now deciding who your business has to employ. It’s bad enough that California shut down business businesses without any plan in place and ruin both the lives of good employees and small business owners. But now though, they will not even allow some of these businesses to hire the best employees back, but are requiring rehiring according to their standards, which in a lot of cases is not in the best interest of the business.
So the only bright spot I can see is that this law is limited to a handful of specific businesses, and those are hotels and private clubs with 50 or more guests rooms, building service businesses, providing janitorial maintenance or security and commercial buildings event centers of more than 50,000 square feet or with more than a thousand seats, airport hospitality, operations, and successor employers to any of the covered establishments.
If the business is conducting the same or similar operations as it did before. COVID-19 so on top of forcing these businesses to hire employees, California chooses California also requires that the employer follow their method of rehiring, including keeping certain records to make it easy for them to audit.
Now, employers covered by this new law are required to reach out to former employees through mail, email a text, and allow them five business days to respond to an offer of reemployment. And these requirements were made in effect through December 31st, 2024. So how insane is that?
You have to hire who they say, do it, do it, how they want it, and you have to do it, do this for the next three years. So the employers must also keep records of rehire offers for at least three years. Following the offer. All of us business owners know that this is just a way for California to audit and collect fines for non-compliance.
So that brings me to the enforcement part of this. There’s no point in having an unconstitutional law, you can also make money from it, right? So the statute will be enforced by the labor commissioner and division of labor standards, enforcement through complaints by employees, inspections and citations issued by the DLSC and or lists or, and or litigation initiated by the labor commissioner.
So in other words, through spot check audits and any former employee that claims they were not rehired when they should have been, here’s where we get to the good part. California really loves harsh bankrupting punishments for labor violations.
So employees not rehired in compliance with the statute may recover their daily wage for each day. A violation continues and the value of any benefits that they would have, they would have received if they were employed.
In other words, if you’re an employer that is not aware of this law, you may have to pay back people that did not work for you. And in cases that does not kill your business. And in a case that it doesn’t kill your business and create layoffs for all your other employees, the employer will also be subject to a hundred dollars civil penalty, plus $500 in liquidated damages per day for each employee. It fails to rehire an accordance with the statute until the violation is cured. This is a crazy law.
First and foremost, these laws are never publicized widely. And I would speculate that the majority of business owners have no idea when they are violating labor laws. Imagine having the labor commissioner show up at your door one day, three years from now and saying that there are 10 people you should have hired three years previously, according to this law, the civil penalty and liquidated damages alone on those 10 people would be a little under 5 million.
These people have to be stopped. They have no compassion for small business and are not even willing to give a warning before they drop the ax. All right. That was a lot of information.
I probably ranted more than I should have. But this is a vicious new law. And if you’re a qualified employer, make sure you speak to your counsel and avoid this huge fifth pitfall.
Until next time.
