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Las últimas actualizaciones de última hora, enviadas directamente a su bandeja de entrada de correo electrónico.
No es frecuente que el tocino lidere un resumen de nuevas leyes que entrarán en vigencia con el Año Nuevo en California.
Pero incluso en la progresista California, ese es el titular de los titulares.
Se encuentra entre una serie de otras leyes diseñadas para salvaguardar a los empleados, proteger a quienes buscan abortos, proteger a los manifestantes de la policía, evitar que los niños se vean influenciados por el género en las exhibiciones de las tiendas y aliviar aún más las sanciones penales para reducir el encarcelamiento masivo.
Varias de las leyes marcan «primicias» nacionales: el primer salario mínimo en llegar a $ 15 por hora, el primero en proteger a los trabajadores del almacén de las cuotas, el primero en exigir salarios por hora para los trabajadores de la confección, el primero en exigir exhibiciones neutrales en cuanto al género.
Se encuentran entre cientos de nuevas leyes que también abordan todo, desde quitar sigilosamente los condones hasta repartir paquetes desechables de condimentos.
Pero primero…
La fabricación de salchichas se deriva de una medida electoral de 2018 en la que los votantes de California establecieron los estándares de espacio vital más estrictos del país para la cría de cerdos a partir del 1 de enero.
Industry lawsuits opposing the initiative failed, but grocers and restauranteurs are now suing to force a 28-month delay. Critics including some lawmakers of both parties have called for putting off enforcement until 2024 for fear prices will rise and jobs will be lost.
California is allowing the continued sale of pork processed under the old rules, which proponents say should blunt any shortage and price surge.
California becomes the first state to require a $15-an-hour minimum wage for businesses with more than 25 employees, though Washington, D.C., and many California cities in the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas already reached that milestone.
The minimum for businesses with 25 or fewer employees bumps to $14 with the new year and will increase to $15 per hour on Jan. 1, 2023. From then on, the wage will rise annually based on inflation.
The increases were set in motion by a 2016 law. Similarly, Illinois and New Jersey are boosting their minimum wage by $1 each year until they hit $15 an hour in 2025.
Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to double down on addressing California’s affordable housing and related homelessness problem after he handily defeated a recall election in September.
Days later, he approved two measures designed to sidestep local zoning ordinances. One allows local governments to rezone neighborhoods near mass transit for up to 10 housing units.
The second requires cities to approve up to four housing units on what was a single-family lot, over the objections of municipal leaders. Some cities were rushing to pass ordinances undercutting the law before it takes effect, while other opponents are gathering signatures for a ballot measure that would restore local control.
California becomes the first U.S. state to bar warehouse retailers like Amazon from firing workers for missing quotas that interfere with bathroom and rest breaks. It also becomes the first state to require the garment industry to pay workers by the hour.
It also now bars secret employment settlements involving discrimination based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, expanding on a 2018 law.
Among two-dozen new higher education laws are two that try to make it easier for students in community colleges to transfer into public universities. One streamlines an application process that students have described as a maze, while another requires community college classes to have the same course numbers as the comparable courses in four-year colleges to reduce confusion.
California is expanding on its existing law that allows restaurants to distribute single-use straws only upon request. Now take-out places can give consumers single-use condiment packages like ketchup and mustard and utensils like knives, forks and spoons only if asked.
It’s among numerous new laws designed to cut waste. One sets what advocates call the nation’s strictest standards for the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol. Another toughens regulations for what can be used in compost.
Yet what California regulators say is the “biggest change to trash in 30 years” comes from a law passed in 2016 that takes effect Jan.
It requires local governments to provide organics recycling collection to all residents and businesses, and phases in a requirement for businesses and large food generators to donate unsold food to distribute to Californians in need.
California becomes the first state to require large department stores – those with at least 500 employees – to display products like toys and toothbrushes in gender-neutral ways.
The requirement does not include clothes and does not ban traditional boys’ and girls’ sections. But it says large stores must also have a gender-neutral section displaying a “reasonable selection” of items “regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys.”
Enforcement won’t start until Jan. 1, 2024.
Several laws that fizzled in 2020 despite national unrest over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer were signed into law in 2021.
They include measures limiting police use of rubber bullets against protesters and providing a way to decertify troubled officers, though some of the certification process doesn’t take effect until January 2023.
Other new laws bar a type of restraint hold that has led to deaths and specify when officers have a duty to intervene to prevent or report excessive force. Another expands the list of police misconduct records that must be made public.
The state also is increasing the minimum age to become a police officer from 18 to 21 and requiring the state attorney general to investigate all fatal shootings by police of unarmed civilians, including those where there is a reasonable dispute over whether that civilian was armed.
California is taking additional steps to ease criminal penalties, building on a decade of efforts to reduce mass incarceration.
Among them, it is ending mandatory minimum prison or jail sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, thus giving judges more discretion to impose probation or other alternative sentences.
It is expanding on a 2019 law that limited the use of the felony murder rule, which previously allowed accomplices in felonies to be convicted of murder if someone died but now is restricted to people who intended to kill or directly participated.
Y está creando la presunción de que los arrestados por acusaciones de violar su libertad condicional serán liberados bajo palabra, a menos que un juez los considere un riesgo para la seguridad pública o la fuga.
También está limitando las penas de prisión para aquellos asociados con pandillas callejeras, considerando circunstancias atenuantes al aplicar mejoras de sentencia y eliminando retroactivamente otras mejoras para reincidentes y ciertos delitos de drogas anteriores.
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