State Legislative Session Kicks Off

Lawmakers to Tackle Cap-and-Trade, Housing, Worker Protections, and AI Oversight

The gears of the 2025 legislative session have started to spin. While the details are still being hammered out, it’s expected that several important labor-related issues will be addressed in Sacramento in the coming months. We spoke with representatives of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (SBCTC) and the California Federation of Labor (Cal Labor Fed) for some insight into what matters most during this session.

Cap-and-Trade, High-Speed Rail, Housing, Silicosis

According to SBCTC Chief of Staff Jeremy Smith, there are several issues the body will be focusing on in the coming months.

Front-and-center on people’s minds, Smith said, is the state’s cap-and-trade program. The nation’s first-of-its-kind trading program for greenhouse gases is overseen by the California Air Resources Board and needs to be re-upped. What exactly that looks like is to be determined.

“I think everybody kind of wants [the program] to stick around,” Smith said. “It’s working.”

Part of the revenues raised from cap- and-trade go to the state’s high-speed rail project, which has employed 15,000 construction workers but has drawn criticism from the Trump administration.

“Every day, there are thousands of construction workers going to work on [high-speed rail] in the Central Valley,” Smith said, “so, we want to absolutely ensure — especially over the next four years, where there’s going to be very little support from the federal government for that project — that it can continue moving forward with the investments the state makes. High-speed rail is something that we continue to be very big supporters of because of how much work it provides to our members.”

The SBCTC is also looking to bring back some legislation from last year that didn’t quite make it over the finish line, including AB 3068 from Assemblymember Matt Haney that would have fast-tracked office-to-residential conversions. Smith said that a big priority is to ensure workers on these projects are paid appropriate wages and meet training requirements.

“Housing remains a very big topic here in the capital,” he said. “Everybody agrees that we aren’t building enough homes to meet demand in the state. What nobody can seem to agree on is why.

“How do you treat the workers in these projects? We have to build our way out of this problem by building more units of affordable housing. But what about the workers building it? That’s our north star. [...] We can’t just ignore how these things are going to get built by the human beings who are going to build them.”

Another bill that’s coming back from last year is SB 20, which seeks to address the outbreak of cases of silicosis in Southern California. Silicosis, a disease caused by inhaling silica dust from cutting manufactured stones, scars the lungs and is likely to be fatal. SB 20 would require the California Department of Public Health to adopt a training curriculum regarding the safe performance of fabrication activities on stone slab products in consultation with representatives of approved apprenticeship programs.

The SBCTC will also look at strengthening prevailing wage laws in the coming session.

Technology, Wage Theft, Worker Protections

The Cal Labor Fed is still finalizing its legislative agenda as of press time, but broadly speaking, it will be supporting bills in four categories: expanding the right to organize and protecting union jobs; worker protections; AI automation and worker technology; and more vigorous labor law enforcement, specifically when it comes to wage theft.

Technology and the ills that it presents to workers are one big concern, including the pervasive nature of artificial intelligence, algorithms, and surveillance.

“We, as the Fed, are now looking at this as a much broader approach protecting all workers as much as we can, especially as we’re looking at increasing guardrails on surveillance, data collection, and algorithmic management of workers,” said Elmer Lizardi, a legislative advocate with the Cal Labor Fed. “People aren’t realizing how pervasive it is, and there are essentially very minimal guardrails on it currently.”

State Senator Jerry McNerney’s (D-Stockton) SB 7 — a.k.a. the No Robo-Bosses Act — aims to ensure that a human participates in making decisions on hiring, firing, discipline, and wages, rather than relying on a computer-generated algorithm.

Other topics important to the Cal Labor Fed include increasing penalties for wage theft and helping to ease the wage-theft complaint process bottleneck.

Addressing worker protections and organizing rights has also become a significant priority during this session, considering what’s happening at the federal level. The Cal Labor Fed is looking at extending evidentiary privilege to union members and their representatives to ensure that they can’t be mandated to reveal what has occurred in these confidential conversations.

“We’re seeing a lot of attacks from the federal government, especially on massive parts of the labor movement,” Lizardi said. “We’re trying to find ways to ensure that workers’ rights to organize stay protected.”