Welcome to the June 26-30 edition of the NFIB California Main Street Minute from your small-business-advocacy team in Sacramento.

• Expect legislative action to accelerate this week as lawmakers eye a July 14 deadline for policy committees to meet and report on bills. That is also the day they will break for a month-long summer recess.

• NFIB California’s list of 51 bills that it has been lobbying for passage or defeat has been updated. One measure has been signed into law, 24 bills of either negative or positive impact to small business are dead for the year, leaving 26 still alive. Only two of the 26 (ACR 80, AB 1355) are of some benefit for small businesses.

• Although regular readers of the Main Street Minute were the first to know, media outlets such as CalMatters have caught up and narrowed to eight, for its readers, the pieces of legislation affecting employer-employee relations the most. From CalMatters:

— Assembly Bill 524, which would outlaw discrimination against a personal caregiver in employment, similar to the protection granted to persons on the basis of gender, age and other personal characteristics Read NFIB/Coalition’s letter of opposition here.

— Assembly Bill 647, which would enhance the job protections of grocery industry workers who are displaced by mergers, sparked by the pending merger of the Kroger and Albertsons grocery chains. NFIB Position: Oppose.

— Senate Bill 365, which would make arbitration of employment disputes, which employers generally favor, less viable by allowing lawsuits to continue while employers seek judicial approval of arbitration proceedings. Read NFIB/Coalition’s letter of opposition here.

— Senate Bill 399, which would prohibit employers from disciplining any worker who refuses to listen to employer presentations on political or religious issues. Read NFIB/Coalition’s letter of opposition here.

— Senate Bill 525, which would increase minimum wages in the health care industry to $21 an hour in 2024 and then $25 in 2025, with cost-of-living increases thereafter. NFIB Position: Oppose.

— Senate Bill 616, which would increase the amount of paid sick leave employers must offer from a minimum of three days a year to seven days. Read NFIB/Coalition’s letter of opposition here.

— Senate Bill 627, which would require retail and service chains, such as restaurants, to use seniority when deciding which workers to retain or transfer when closing outlets. NFIB Position: Oppose.

— Senate Bill 723, which would make permanent a temporary law passed during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect return rights of workers in the hospitality industry who are laid off.” Read NFIB/Coalition’s letter of opposition here.

• TAKE ACTION—NFIB will send its members two Action Alerts this week, One on Assembly Bill 524, one on Senate Bill 616. Please use them to register your opposition with lawmakers. They are a really effective tool for conveying the small business message.

• From the June edition of the California Department of Finance’s Finance Bulletin, released last Thursday (June 22), “Preliminary General Fund agency cash receipts for the first eleven months of the 2022-23 fiscal year were $195 million below the 2023-24 May Revision forecast of $147.497 billion and matched the forecast in May. However, it is worth noting these numbers exclude $173 million in May personal income withholding that will be reflected in June cash receipts due to a processing delay.”

• Last Tuesday (June 20), the University of California San Francisco released a widely reported study on the intractable problem of homelessness. CalMatters columnist Dan Walters had this to say about it.

• “The study bolsters previous research which concluded that California’s chronic shortage of housing, which imposes crushing costs on low-income families, lies at the heart of the crisis.” But if all politics is local, as the late U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, so, too, according to Walters, is homelessness.

• “… The state plays only a tangential role in providing housing and social, medical, addiction and mental health services to those in squalid encampments that have become unwanted California symbols and fodder for political and media critics.

• “City governments are the main overseers of housing construction and joust with the state incessantly over zoning, building permits and other hurdles for projects to house low-income families and individuals – the ones most in peril of becoming homeless.

• “Meanwhile, county officials provide welfare, medical and mental health services with local, state and federal funds and often squabble with their city counterparts over how those programs are sited and administered in urban centers.”

• Given how much local and state money has already been spent on the homeless problem, NFIB California gave a cursory glance at the 96-page report for any call to spend even more and is happy to report that not much more at all is called for. In fact, one of the report’s policy recommendations to “Increase household incomes through evidence-based employment supports” is so bureaucratically vague as to render it harmless.

• One thing that does stand out, however, is how little money it might have taken, had it been spent right, to put a serious dent in the problem. “Seventy percent believed that a monthly rental subsidy of $300-$500 would have prevented their homelessness for a sustained period; 82% believed receiving a one-time payment of $5,000-$10,000 would have prevented their homelessness; 90% believed that receiving a Housing Choice Voucher or similar option would have done so.”

• On June 21, NFIB sent a Key Vote letter to the House of Representatives in support of H.R. 3799, the CHOICE Arrangement Act, which would improve health insurance affordability and flexibility for small business owners and their employees.

• On June 22, NFIB Vice President of Federal Government Relations Kevin Kuhlman testified before the U.S. House Budget Committee in a hearing titled, “Reigniting American Growth and Prosperity Series: Incentivizing Economic Excellence Through Tax Policy.” Kuhlman shared NFIB’s “My Small Business is Not a Tax Loophole” petition that now has over 21,000 small business owner signatures opposing the President’s proposed 5% Small Business Surtax. Watch the hearing here. Watch the key points here.

— During the hearing, Kuhlman quoted, NFIB-PA member David Cranston, who stated previously in a hearing, “I now qualify for a 20% deduction on my pass-through income. In real terms, this means I will be able to keep between $1,200 and $2,500 a quarter in my business that I would otherwise have paid in taxes. The ability to keep $5,000 to $10,000 a year in my company is a big deal to a small business owner like me.”

• On June 23, the Small Business Legal Center closed out its 2022-2023 Supreme Court caseload with the decision in Coinbase v. Bielski, a win for arbitration and for businesses that prefer to handle customer and employee complaints in arbitration.