Guest Commentary

Our economy and workforce are transforming, especially in California. We cannot restrict workplace flexibility with bad court rulings, such as Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles. Instead, we need to ensure Californians have the opportunity to choose the terms on which they work.

California needs lawyers who reflect the state’s rich diversity. Recognizing the importance of this, lawmakers recently amended the State Bar’s public protection mission to include the furthering of diversity and inclusion in the profession. Admittedly, we have a long way to go.

One would expect to see growing devotion by the Democratic-led California Legislature to do more to help Californians access electric cars and cut pollution from delivery trucks. Instead, the California Assembly, specifically its transportation committee, has been the graveyard for legislation designed to help advance zero-emission vehicles.

Failure to respond to California’s sexually transmitted disease crisis will have serious and direct health consequences for Californians, ranging from infertility and blindness at the individual level, to facilitating the development of multi-drug resistant and untreatable gonorrhea infections similar to cases already occurring outside the United States. If Californians don’t demand urgent action to stop this crisis in its tracks, we will doom the current generation of young adults to a legacy of ill health they did not deserve.

Despite crime being at historic lows, overall school shootings doubled between 2013 and 2018. Appallingly, in each of these attacks, information known to school officials, law enforcement, counselors, friends and neighbors reasonably should have been used to prevent the attack. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley's AB 1722 would require a common-sense approach to building best practices into our regional school safety plans to avert such shootings.

Because marijuana use may pose potential hazards to both the individual consumer and to public safety that advocacy groups such as mine, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, believe that lawmakers should regulate it accordingly.

Early diagnosis and intervention is essential to attaining better outcomes for mental illness. But in the struggle to help people with mental illness cope, a powerful long term tool has been overlooked: school. Education has an outsized impact on the prospects for people with serious mental disorders.

In California, paying women less is a form of wage theft. The law also prohibits paying someone less for substantially similar work on the basis of race or ethnicity. What makes California’s pay equity law particularly significant is that it does not require proof of discrimination or intent.

Raising property taxes on businesses means they will pass on the costs to every Californian by increasing prices on just about everything we buy and use, from diapers and day care to gasoline and groceries. That’s the last thing hardworking families need.

Death and taxes are all but certain. But the bright side is that the power to tax ultimately lies with the people, as Californians have the constitutional right to vote on local taxes, and the right to elect state officials with taxing power.