HomeMy WebLinkAboutAB 1484 Temporary Public Employees - City of SLO OPPOSITION Letter
May 10, 2023
The Honorable Tina McKinnor
Chair, Assembly Public Employment and Retirement Committee
Legislative Office Building, Room 153
Sacramento, California 95814
RE: AB 1484 (Zbur): Temporary public employees – OPPOSE -As Amended April 12, 2023
Dear Assemblymember McKinnor,
The City of San Luis Obispo is opposed to Assembly Bill 1484 (Zbur). Temporary positions provide
income, stability, and flexibility to working parents, students, and those supplementing
additional full or part-time employment, or just entering or re-entering the workforce, and are
often an important stepping-stone to long-term public employment. Moreover, temporary
employees are integral to scaling workforce to community priorities and transitory, fluid spikes
in workload demands, related to conditions like pandemic, wildfire, floods and other emergency
operations. This bill will disincentivize cities from offering these positions and will further cement
the barriers to upward mobility, income equality and temporary workforce expansion capacity
for the very persons whom this bill aims to help and the communities that they serve.
This bill would: inflexibly mandate that temporary employees be included within the same
bargaining unit as permanent employees; and that the wages, hours, plus terms and conditions
of employment for both temporary and permanent employees must be bargained together in a
single memorandum of understanding. This result is already possible under current law, but only
if the temporary and permanent employees have a "community of interest" making such
combined treatment appropriate – an important component of fair representation and
bargaining that this bill eschews.
Additionally, cities often offer paid student internship or fellowship programs, which provide
valuable work experience for the next generation of public employees. Requiring cities to include
such temporary positions within the bargaining unit (and afford ing them discharge protections
and public employment property rights) will strongly discourage cities like ours from offering
such programs, or will encourage offering only unpaid internships, to the detriment of financially
vulnerable students and local economies.
Temporary employees are brought in for a temporary, seasonal, and urgent need and the
provisions of this bill severely limit local agencies’ ability to utilize this workfor ce, ultimately
Oppose - AB 1484 (Zbur) Temporary public employees
impacting our ability to provide services. For these reasons the City of San Luis Obispo
respectfully OPPOSES AB 1484.
Sincerely,
Erica A. Stewart
Mayor
City of San Luis Obispo
cc: Senator John Laird, Fax: (916) 651-4017
Assembly Member Dawn Addis, Fax (916) 319-2135
Dave Mullinax, League of California Cities, dmullinax@cacities.org
League of California Cities (via email: cityletters@calcities.org)