Many Employment Law Changes Are Coming to California in 2025: Here Is the Third of Several Posts Covering the Highlights

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Patricia Tsipras

December 3, 2024

California Establishes a Labor Trafficking Unit
Assembly Bill 1888 – effective on January 1, 2025 – establishes within the Department of Justice a Labor Trafficking Unit (Unit) to receive labor trafficking reports and complaints from law enforcement agencies and other governmental entities.  The law requires, among other things, that:

• the Unit refer the reports or complaints to, and coordinate with, appropriate agencies/entities for investigation, prosecution, or other remedies.
• the Unit ensure use of a victim-centered approach when receiving and processing victim reports or complaints of labor trafficking and must ensure that victims are informed of the services available to them.
• the Department of Industrial Relations and the Civil Rights Department collaborate with the Unit to develop policies, procedures, and protocols to track, record, and report potential labor trafficking to the Unit.
• the Unit develop a tracking and reporting system to collect labor trafficking reports and complaints for aggregation and analysis for further investigation, civil action, criminal prosecution, or other remedy.

California Requires Transparency for Social Compliance Audits
Assembly Bill 3234 will become effective on January 1, 2025.  It imposes transparency requirements for employers who choose to conduct social compliance audits (the law does not require employers to conduct such audits).

What is a social compliance audit?
A social compliance audit is a “voluntary, nongovernmental inspection or assessment of an employer’s operation or practice to evaluate whether the operations or practices are in compliance with state and federal labor laws, including, but not limited to, wage and hour and health safety regulations, including those regarding child labor.”  A child is a person under 18 years of age.

What transparency must an employer provide?
An employer who voluntarily subjects itself to a social compliance audit must post a clear and conspicuous link on its website reporting its findings.  The report must include the following information:

• the year, month, day, and time that the audit was conducted, including whether the audit was conducted during a day or night shift
• whether the employer engaged in, or supports the use of, child labor
• a copy of any written policies and procedures of the employer regarding the employment of children
• whether the employer exposed children to any workplace conditions that are hazardous or unsafe for their physical or mental development
• whether children worked for the employer within or outside regular school hours

California Will Require Consent to Use Digital Replicas
California enacted two laws – both effective January 1, 2025 – in an effort to help actors and performers protect their digital likenesses in audio and visual productions.  This legislation recognizes how pervasive and impactful Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become and gives workers more protections to promote its responsible use.

Specifically, to ensure that AI is not used to replicate performers’ voices or likenesses without their permission, Assembly Bill 2602 requires contracts to specify the use of AI-generated digital replicas of a performer’s voice or likeness, and it requires that the performer by professionally represented (legal or union) in negotiating those contracts.

Similarly, Assembly Bill 1836 prohibits commercial use (in films, television shows, video games, audio books, and other media) or digital replicas of deceased performers without first obtaining the consent of those performers’ estates.

The bills define a digital replica as “ a computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual that is embodied in a sound recording, image, audiovisual work, or transmission in which the actual individual either did not actually perform or appear, or the actual individual did perform or appear, but the fundamental character of the performance or appearance has been materially altered.”

California Strengthens Labor Enforcement and Protects Stage Production Workers
Assembly Bill 2738 – effective on January 1, 2025 – provides more tools to enforce existing laws.  It further creates transparency in the live event industry to protect stage production workers from unsafe working conditions.

Until January 1, 2029, existing California law authorizes a public prosecutor to prosecute actions for violation of specified provisions of the Labor Code and to apply any recovery first to payments (like wages and damages) due to affected workers, with all recovered civil penalties to be paid to the General Fund of the State.  Assembly Bill 2738 will, instead, require recoveries to be applied first to payments due to affected workers, then to attorney’s fees and costs if authorized by the Labor Code, with the remaining recoveries to be divided equally between the General Fund of the State and the public prosecutor’s office to be used to support labor law enforcement.

Furthermore, existing California law requires an entity that contracts with an entertainment events vendor to require the vendor to certify that its employees and its subcontractors’ employees have complied with specified training, certification, and workforce requirements of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Assembly Bill 2738 will require the entertainment events vendor to provide certain records to the contracting entity about the employees and the trainings they have completed.  Those records will be subject to the California Public Records Act.  The bill will expand the scope of those subject to penalties for a violation of its provisions to include a public events venue or a contracting entity.  Additionally, the bill will allow its provisions to be enforced by a public prosecutor pursuant to the procedures noted above.

The author of this article, Patricia Tsipras, is a member of the Bar of Pennsylvania.  This article is designed to provide one perspective regarding recent legal developments, and is not intended to serve as legal advice in Pennsylvania, California, or any other jurisdiction, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship with any reader of the article where one does not exist.  Always consult an attorney with specific legal issues.