Legislators introduced a pair of bills that revive ideas that had been killed off in past sessions. One bill brings back a proposal for a state-run medical provider network (MPN), while the other revives a heat illness presumption for privately employed farmworkers that was vetoed last year. Assemblyman Esmeralda Soria (D-Merced) is carrying AB 1498 …
Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected a proposal to give the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board a role in overseeing employers’ compliance with California’s workplace health and safety laws. The Governor also rejected measures to boost salaries for California Department of Insurance investigators, another to expand 4850 leave to more public employees, and proposed changes to the California …
California employers and insurance companies face new laws impacting the state’s workers’ comp system operations in 2025 and beyond. Some bills were signed earlier in the session, but the fate of others wasn’t decided until the final days of the session. The most troublesome measures fell to Governor Gavin Newsom’s veto pen (see related story). …
Governor Gavin Newsom is slowly working through the hundreds of bills the California Legislature sent to his desk this year. The bills include controversial measures to create a new private sector workers’ comp presumption for farmworkers who succumb to heat-related injuries and another to require all private sector utilization review decisions to go through California-licensed …
California legislators faced an early hurdle to keep their 2024 bills alive and viable. Legislative rules required fiscal bills to clear the policy committees in their house of origin by last Friday. Nonfiscal bills have until this Friday to reach the floor of their house of origin. Which workers’ comp bills made it? Here is …
Assemblyman Kate Sanchez (R-Rancho Santa Margarita) is carrying legislation designed to end California’s use of the ABC test to differentiate between independent contractors and employees. The legislator introduced AB 1928 “to suspend and nullify the California Supreme Court’s decision in Dynamex Operations and provide that this decision does not apply for purposes of California law.” …
Proposals to expand California’s workers’ comp presumptions to more workers fell under Governor Gavin Newsom’s veto, but he signed another measure to continue an existing post-traumatic stress disorder presumption. The successful bill, SB 623 by Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz), also calls for the Commission on Health, Safety and Workers’ Compensation to study the presumption …