Long Beach, California is often an incubator for novel employment laws. For example, in the hospitality industry, Long Beach was one of the “early adopters” of ordinances regulating workplace standards for hotel workers, including providing workers with panic buttons, mandating that laid-off workers be recalled in the order of seniority (“right of recall”), and implementing restrictions on the workloads of housekeepers. Other California cities followed suit, and even the state of California eventually adopted its own right of recall law. As another example, in the grocery industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, Long Beach adopted a “hazard pay” ordinance for grocery store workers.
This trend of local regulation of working conditions has been developing for the past decade or so—which we have termed the “municipalization” of employment law. Cities are legislating matters that traditionally might have been the province of labor union bargaining: supplemental pay, seniority, and workload. Long Beach now has further advanced the trend—regulating workloads in the grocery industry with a self-checkout staffing ordinance. This first-of-its-kind ordinance could become a model for urban retail policy in the post-pandemic economy. What started in Long Beach may soon become a statewide—or even national—shift in how cities regulate retail automation.
Applicability
This ordinance1 apples to:
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