CA’s New Fast-Food Industry Law on Hold Implementation of a landmark law passed last year in California ( AB 257 ) aimed at improving working conditions for fast-food employees and potentially increasing their minimum wage up to $22 per hour has been put...
Flurry of Bills Targeting Vaccine Makers and Mandates: Already this year lawmakers in 18 states have introduced over 80 measures dealing with vaccine policy, according to Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law. Most of...
With so much of our world online, data privacy has become a major concern for American policymakers. But in the absence of comprehensive federal legislation addressing data privacy, states are leading the way—creating compliance headaches for businesses....
NLRB Official Rejects Amazon’s Effort to Overturn Union Victory in NYC: A regional director of the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s effort to overturn a union victory at the company’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, which has...
Illicit Crypto Use Reaches $20B: The use of cryptocurrencies for illicit purposes reached a record $20.1 billion in 2022, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. Despite falling crypto transaction volumes overall, the value of illicit transactions...
U.S. Hospital Use of Volunteers May Violate Federal Rules: Volunteer workers have become an integral part of the labor force at hospitals across the country. According to analysis of federal and other data by Kaiser Health News, hospitals may use over $5 billion...
As the nation has transitioned to living with COVID-19, the attention of state lawmakers has shifted away from pandemic-related matters like testing availability and vaccine distribution to other concerns. Many of the issues we expect to top state legislative agendas...
STATE NET ® THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES What It Takes to Build an Effective DEI Program Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) has been an agenda item in corporate boardrooms for some time, but it has attracted more Growing Importance of DEI Fortune...
More GOP Govs Ban TikTok Citing data privacy concerns, a growing number of Republican governors have issued orders barring the use of the popular Chinese-owned social media app TikTok from state-owned devices. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem started the trend...
Big Tech Sues to Block CA Child Online Protection Law The tech industry group NetChoice is suing to block California’s new Age-Appropriate Design Code Act ( AB 2273 ), which is aimed at making the internet safer for kids. NetChoice, which includes Amazon...
FL Approves Major Property Insurance Reforms Florida lawmakers passed sweeping legislation aimed at ending the state’s years-long property insurance crisis. If signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), the bill ( SB 2 c ), which sailed through both chambers during...
Hospitals Getting Creative to Mitigate Staffing Shortages With contract labor expenses up almost 500 percent from where they were before the pandemic, a growing number of hospital systems are creating in-house staffing systems to help them deal with the nationwide...
Former longtime U.S. Rep. Tip O’Neill (D-MA) famously lived by the mantra that “ all politics is local .” It was certainly true in O’Neil’s heyday, and it was still so when I got to the State Net Capitol Journal in 2002. But with...
NY Gov Partially Limits Bitcoin Mining, Signs NIL Bill New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has signed legislation imposing the nation’s first temporary ban on new fossil fuel-powered cryptocurrency mining projects. The moratorium under AB 7389 applies to fossil...
SF Authorizes Police Use of Lethal Robots On an 8-3 vote, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors authorized police to deploy robots with lethal force in very rare cases involving violent suspects such as mass shooters. A minority of the board opposed the...