“You’ve got a broad, vaguely worded statute that could get employers into a lot of trouble, and you got this heavy-handed enforcement, which could result in something as high as punitive damages.”

So warned labor law specialist Ben Ebbink about the new captive audience law in the first part of an exclusive webinar for NFIB California members presented March 26.

Bringing small business owners the latest information from the leading experts in their field is one of the many benefits of membership in NFIB. Very few labor and employment attorneys in California can match the experience of Ben Ebbink, a partner in the Sacramento and Washington D.C. offices of Fisher Phillips, and co-chair of its Government Relations Practice Group and chair of its Staffing Industry Group.

Captive audience has been a common term used for many years in the context of labor organizing, said Ebbink. Unions have always wanted to get rid of it and finally succeeded under the Biden administration. But the new Trump administration is rolling it back. In stepped California with its own version of a law banning captive audience, Senate Bill 399. Ebbink thoroughly dissects SB 399. He also took questions and made remarks on the minimum wage, Workplace Violence Prevention Plans, Senate Bill 7 (No Robot Bosses Act), workplace surveillance (Assembly Bill 1331), and location privacy (Assembly Bill 1355).

Click the hyperlink above or the graphic below to see the presentation.