2020’s key legal developments, some that carry past pandemic
The governor and other state and local executive officials, especially public health officers, generally set the rules that governed workplaces suddenly upended by the coronavirus. Executive officials may issue, modify and rescind orders faster than legislators may enact, amend and repeal laws.
Officials used their emergency powers to issue sweeping edicts on what, where, when and how work could be performed. Most recently, Cal-OSHA issued detailed emergency rules mandating employer action to prevent and contain the spread of COVID-19 and mandating what, when, and to whom employers must report when COVID-19 nonetheless invades the workplace.
The state Legislature and U.S. Congress also acted. Congress enacted paid leave laws which, among other things, addressed the singularly disruptive impact of pandemic-related school closures. Congress also authorized supplemental unemployment compensation benefits and made more workers eligible for those benefits.
Existing laws obligating employers to accommodate disabilities and religious beliefs and to provide healthful workplaces were applied in novel ways as the pandemic intensified. Employers will review those same laws, guided by ethical principles, in deciding whether to mandate vaccination in their workplaces as the pandemic subsides.
Legislative actions and judicial rulings have a durability that time-limited emergency actions of executive officials necessarily do not. While fully a third of my 27 columns this year focused on COVID-19-related legal developments, here are a couple of other developments covered in
this space whose impact will extend beyond the pandemic.
Changes to independent contractor law
The California Legislature enacted AB 2257, which repealed and replaced the
AB 5 independent contractor law. The core of the former law remained: hiring entities generally must pass a strict ABC test to classify a worker as an independent contractor instead of an employee. Under that test, a worker is presumed to be an employee unless the hiring entity can show the worker: (A) works relatively free of the hiring entity’s control;
(B) performs work beyond the “usual course of the hiring entity’s business”; and (C) is engaged in an independent trade, occupation, or business similar to the work performed.
But AB 2257 made significant changes to the exceptions to the ABC test. For example, the new law expanded the 12-part business-to-business exception to service providers: (1) whose employees solely provide services to the customers of the contracting entity under the name of the service provider; and (2) that regularly contract with other businesses.
Separately, in passing Proposition 22, California voters created a new kind of independent contractor limited to app-based drivers. The law makes those drivers independent contractors with limited employee-like rights, such as the right to a minimum hourly wage for hours worked.
Application of state wage laws to non-Californians
In two rulings earlier this year, the California Supreme Court held that California wage rules apply