In my final scorecard on the Governor’s signing decisions, AB 1883 got two sentences and one piece of homework: ask your camera-analytics and call-monitoring vendors whether any feature scores “sentiment” or “engagement,” and turn it off for employees. That is still the homework. But at yesterday’s Zaller Law Masterclass on the new laws for 2027, my partner Joshua Dale walked through AB 1883 in more detail, and the questions that came in through the chat showed where employers are actually going to run into this law. It is not where most people expect.
Quick background. On September 30, Governor Newsom signed AB 1883, which adds new provisions to the Labor Code beginning January 1, 2027. Employers may not use a workplace surveillance tool that uses artificial intelligence on employees to (1) recognize, or make inferences or predictions about, an employee’s emotional state, or (2) collect neural data. As Joshua put it, AB 1883 is a vestige of SB 7, the broader “No Robo Bosses” bill the Governor vetoed last year. Most of SB 7 came back this year as the narrower SB 947; the piece aimed at emotional surveillance came back as its own bill.
Here are five takeaways for California employers.
1. The line is mood, not movement.
The most useful framing from the masterclass was Joshua’s: think of AB 1883 as regulating subjective emotional states. The law does not ban video monitoring, and it does not ban AI. Many businesses have to run cameras, and they can keep doing so. Employers...
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