California’s Capitol is once again the scene of a familiar fight, as lawmakers race toward their August 31 deadline with business groups on one side and a coalition of unions, trial attorneys, consumer advocates and environmental organizations on the other.
It’s a battle that plays out in Sacramento nearly every year, sometimes over the same issues for decades running. The specific bills change, but the basic tension does not: advocacy groups pushing new rules they say protect workers, shoppers or the environment, and business leaders warning that those same rules will drive up costs and chase companies out of the state.
With the two-year legislative session winding down, several bills born out of this rivalry remain in play, and both sides are working hard to shape how they turn out.
One closely watched measure is Assembly Bill 2564, introduced by Assemblymember Christopher Ward, a San Diego Democrat, at the request of labor unions, consumer organizations and groups representing low-income Californians. The bill would ban a practice known as “surveillance pricing,” in which retailers use shoppers’ personal data to set individualized prices through algorithms.
Supporters argue the practice can lead to unfair or discriminatory pricing and should be curbed. Retailers counter that the bill’s language is broad enough to wipe out common discount programs, including coupons and loyalty rewards, ultimately making everyday purchases more expensive in a state already known for its high cost of living.
A bigger fight, at least in terms of its potential impact on California’s business climate, centers on Assembly Bill 1776, authored by Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, a Davis Democrat. The bill would expand the reach of California’s century-old Cartwright Act, the state’s primary antitrust law, which has allowed legal action against companies that collude to squeeze out competitors and inflate prices since 1907.
AB 1776 would go further, permitting legal action against companies that achieve market dominance even without engaging in collusion. The idea grew out of a recommendation from the California Law Revision Commission, which argued the original law never anticipated the kind of market concentration seen in today’s economy. The bill has drawn support from a broad coalition of consumer groups and labor organizations.
Business advocates, led by the California Chamber of Commerce, see it differently. They argue the bill would expose companies to lawsuits simply for succeeding in the marketplace through legitimate competition, rather than through any wrongdoing.
An earlier version of the bill would have let private attorneys file lawsuits under the law on their own initiative — a provision critics considered especially dangerous because of the potential flood of litigation it could unleash. That language was stripped out after the bill cleared the Assembly on a narrow vote and headed to the Senate, meaning enforcement would now fall to the state attorney general or local prosecutors rather than private lawyers.
Even with that change, the Chamber remains firmly opposed. In a statement, spokesperson John Myers said the bill’s backers have yet to identify any concrete examples of the market behavior they’re trying to stop.
“The author and sponsors of AB 1776 have never brought forward specific, real-world examples of the behavior they are seeking to change,” Myers said. “That’s why we’ve often seen this as a ‘solution in search of a problem,’ the kind of fundamental flaw that makes legislative negotiations extremely difficult, if not impossible.”
Regardless of how these bills — and several others caught in the same crossfire — fare before the August 31 deadline, the underlying struggle between business interests and their perennial opponents is far from finished. Lawmakers will pick it back up when they return to Sacramento in December, joined by a handful of new legislators and, come January, a newly inaugurated governor.
Original source: CalMatters
