Welcome to the August 4-8 edition of the Main Street Minute from your small-business-advocacy team in Sacramento.

The Legislature

Lawmakers are on summer recess and will reconvene August 18.

In the meantime, NFIB is putting the finishing touches on its August 26 Leadership Day at the Capitol. Click here for a description of last year’s event.

A Glimpse at the Next Senate President

“[Sen. Scott] Wiener, in tandem with Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, has been the tip of the spear, pushing through a host of aggressive bills to turbocharge housing construction. Most notably, Wiener and Wicks championed a proposal this year to bypass environmental reviews for new housing in urban areas — the biggest reform to the landmark California Environmental Quality Act in a generation,” reports Politico California Playbook.

“Incoming Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, one of the chamber’s biggest environmental champions and a lukewarm supporter of housing legislation, is widely expected to remove Wiener as chair of the powerful budget committee (this year’s CEQA reforms advanced through budget bills).”

Done Your Workplace Violence Prevention Plan Yet?

It’s been more than a year now since the July 1, 2024, start date for all California businesses, with few exceptions, to have had their state-mandated workplace violence prevention plans written and available to anyone who requests to see them.

NFIB vigorously opposed Senate Bill 553, which created this onerous and needless obligation, but it did become law and must be complied with.

With the summer months here, now might be a good time to review your obligations if you have yet to comply with the law. And, don’t feel bad if you haven’t already. We suspect that’s the case with a majority of employers.

We suggest starting with the information NFIB put in this news release from last year. Next, we recommend reading attorney Hannah Sweiss’ post, FP’s Workplace Violence Prevention Awareness Kit for Employers, on the Fisher Phillip website. Sweiss also produced a webinar for NFIB, the link of which you can find in the news release mentioned above, and of which we thank her for again.

Excerpt: “Most employers in California must establish a written Workplace Violence Prevention Plan, train employees and supervisors on workplace violence matters, maintain a violence incident log, and keep records of all training and violent workplace incidents that occur. Click here to read more about the California law, which took effect last year and is in addition to Cal/OSHA’s existing healthcare workplace violence prevention rule.”

Finally, check out Cal/OSHA Workplace Violence Prevention for General Industry (Non-Health Care Settings) on the Department of Industrial Relations website.

Speaking of July 1 Start Dates

“For the first time, domestic workers employed by companies in California, such as housecleaners, caregivers and gardeners, will be covered by state workplace safety and health laws starting July 1, 2025. Until now, these laws did not cover individuals performing household domestic work, leaving a gap in coverage,” said the Department of Industrial Relations in this news release.

NFIB California in the News

One of the differences — and big values — between NFIB and other business groups are the issues we just will not let go of. Major industries and big businesses have regulatory compliance specialists on staff. Not so, small businesses. As a result, small businesses are ripe game for the scandalous practice of shakedown lawsuits, which have been going on across the country for longer than it should have been allowed to.

A Portland, Oregon, TV station recently described the racket. “As KGW previously reported, the Wampler firm, along with attorney B.J. Wade of Memphis, followed a playbook. They found people with disabilities and paid them $200 for every business they visited. Then, the out-of-town lawyers hired a local attorney who sent the business a letter threatening to sue and attached a boilerplate complaint. The demand letter offered an alternative: if the property owner paid thousands of dollars in attorney fees and brought its property into ADA compliance, the lawyer wouldn’t sue the business.”

California Sen. Roger Niello came up with a way to throw a serious wrench into the works. His Senate Bill 84 would allow small businesses a short period of time to correct ADA violations before being sued. A wonderfully simple idea that drew an impressive bipartisan coalition of supporters and passing the State Senate 34 to 2. When the Assembly refused to give SB 84 even one hearing, NFIB, more than any other group, banged the media drums loudly.

“In a turn that the California National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) called ‘infuriating,’ that hearing wasn’t scheduled,” reported The Business Journal of Fresno. “Tim Taylor, NFIB’s legislative director, did much of the heavy lifting getting SB 84 through the Senate. He didn’t like how it all went down. ‘If it dies in the light of day, that’s fine. That’s part of the process,’ Taylor said in an NFIB newsletter. ‘But for it to die in darkness, that’s a problem, and that’s what leaves a really bad taste in everyone’s mouth.’”

NFIB has vowed to put the heat on legislators to bring this up again next year and has promised to make it a big issue in next year’s campaigns.

We also draw your attention to these two publications from the NFIB Small Business Legal Center:

— Guide to Responding to ADA Lawsuits

— ADA Website Accessibility. How to Avoid Lawsuits

Speaking of Tim Taylor

His remarks about the sorry state of California’s Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund were reported by The Center Square for a story that ran in 50 other media up and down the state and across the country.

“We still haven’t seen any real accountability with respect to the fraudulent claims paid out by the [California Employment Development Department] and yet the state’s UI debt surges while struggling small businesses are forced to make the minimum payment on the state’s maxed-out credit card,” Tim Taylor, California policy director for the National Federation of Independent Business, told The Center Square. “Households can’t survive that way and neither can states.”

Not a Tempest in a Teapot

“It’s one thing to rant at Southwest Airlines on X or confront Chipotle over its allegedly stingy burrito bowls, but it’s a different beast when influencers attack mom-and-pop operations that lack in-house crisis-management teams. And it’s not as if content creators are bound by a code of professional ethics. To the contrary, their willingness to accept free meals in return for favorable coverage makes them walking conflicts of interest.”

So wrote The San Francisco Standard in a story it published last Wednesday (July 30), The food influencers must be stopped.

“In the influencer ecosystem, accountability seems unevenly distributed, at best. We reached out several times to the email address associated with @itskarlabb and did not hear back. Even after her story made national news and chalked up 21 million views on TikTok, her identity remains unknown. Although she took down an acclaimed chef and now boasts more than 400,000 followers — up from 20,000 last week — she has neither granted a single interview nor taken responsibility for the carnage and collateral damage her post unleashed.”

Added the website Eater in its story, A ‘Micro-Influencer’ Drama Caused a Brand New Wine Bar to Close Permanently, “Social media reactions poured in. Under the cafe’s public posts, comments ranged from supportive to skeptical. Some noted the irony of a ‘micro’ influencer causing this much fallout, while others questioned whether influencers should wield so much public influence. Several TikTokers joined the conversation, including Ed Choi (@etchaskej), whose reaction video criticizing the chef and calling for the public not to support Kis Cafe has now surpassed 3.2 million views.”

According to NFIB’s Small Business and Technology survey, 82% of small businesses have their own websites. If you have one or want to start one, NFIB offers some advice in an episode of its Small Business Rundown, Expert Tips: Social Media for Small Business Growth.

And if you get some nasty feedback on it, Forbes magazine has 12 Tips For Responding To Negative Feedback On Social Media.

Big Date Ahead

For whatever small-business-marketing potential it may have, on September 9, California will be 175 years old. On this day in 1850, it became the 31st state. More from the State Library here.

From One Who Should Know

“’Newsom is running for president, so let’s just do away with the fiction of ‘might be running for president,’ said Jim Ross, a consultant who ran Newsom’s first San Francisco mayoral campaign in 2003. ‘He needs to raise money — $40 million, $50 million, $100 million — to run for president, and to do that, he needs to get all these San Francisco-oriented, California-oriented AI folks to give him money.’” – The San Francisco Standard.

Calendar

— August 18: Legislature reconvenes from summer recess

— August 26: NFIB California’s Leadership Day at the Capitol

— August 29: Last day for fiscal committees to hear and report bills to the floor

— September 1: Labor Day. Legislature not in session

— September 12, 2025-January 5, 2026: Interim recess of the 2025-2026 session of the California State Legislature

— October 15: Last day for governor to sign or veto bills passed before September 12.

National

Highlights from Federal Government Relations Principal Louis Bertolotti’s weekly report

— There are now 169 House and 31 Senate cosponsors of the Repealing Big Brother Overreach Act, the bill that would eliminate the BOI reporting requirement for small businesses. This week, NFIB staff did multiple interviews on this topic:

Josh McLeod joined Washington Report, Issues Today, KLZ Radio in Colorado, and WPTF Morning News in North Carolina.

Brad Close joined The David Webb Show (press release here).

Jeff Brabant joined “Emery on Iowa” on WHO Radio in Iowa.

— Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg and Director of Research and Policy Analysis Peter Hansen penned an op-ed in Forbes regarding recession concerns. Dunkelberg also published a separate op-ed in Forbes on the state of the small business economy.

— NFIB’s Small Business Legal Center released its July Docket.

Included in the newsletter is the fact that NFIB participated in 7 Supreme Court cases this year, representing over 10% of the term’s total cases.

Next Main Street Minute: August 11. All Main Streets Minutes can be found on the NFIB website here. Pull down the California tab in the upper-right-hand corner.