One, the Housing Accountability Act, or HAA, aims to remove barriers to construction, while the older California Environmental Quality Act has been employed to delay or block specific projects.

One tactic used by local authorities to overcome the accountability law’s pro-housing provisions has been indefinitely delaying decisions on whether projects are eligible for CEQA clearance by demanding ever-more data from developers.

Last year, the Legislature, which has been strengthening HAA provisions in recent years, cracked down on CEQA delays by passing Assembly Bill 1633, carried by Assemblyman Phil Ting, a Democrat from San Francisco, where the tactic has often been employed. It decreed that excessive CEQA delays in high-density urban projects violate state law and subject officials to lawsuits.

While AB 1633 gives pro-housing advocates a new legal weapon, its applicability to only specific kinds of projects falls short of a wider overhaul of CEQA that some political figures have supported.

For instance, former Gov. Jerry Brown once described CEQA reform as “the Lord’s work,” but was unwilling to take on the heavy political burden such changes would require. If politicians are unwilling to take on CEQA reform — which would draw opposition from environmental groups, and labor unions which invoke the law to demand agreements with developers — California’s courts may do the job.

This month, a state appellate court delivered a ruling that, if not overturned by the state Supreme Court, would make it much more difficult to use CEQA to stop projects that conform to local zoning laws.

The case involved a corporation, Hilltop Group Inc., that wanted to construct a facility to recycle construction debris on a site adjacent to Interstate 15 in northern San Diego County that had been designated for industrial uses in the county’s general plan.

Its admission to the union in 1850 was largely driven by the gold rush, which temporarily supplanted the agriculture and cattle ranching that had been economic mainstays.

When the gold rush cooled in the late 19th century, farming and ranching resumed their central roles. It’s hard to believe now, but Los Angeles County was the nation’s most agriculturally productive county in the first decades of the 20th century.

The state’s northern reaches developed a major timber industry, and oddly oil was first discovered in 1865 amid Humboldt County’s dense forests, a historic fact perpetuated in the name of a tiny hamlet, Petrolia.

However, Southern California saw a much larger oil boom in the final years of the century, and California quickly became the nation’s biggest petroleum producer. Simultaneously, the movie industry blossomed in Southern California, thanks to its scenic settings and sunny weather and the desires of early movie moguls to escape from the East Coast’s intolerant attitudes and legal disputes.

California’s economy, still largely rooted in extracting resources from the earth, underwent a major change when the nation became embroiled in World War II. It became a staging point for the Pacific war, the site of numerous military training bases and an industrial powerhouse producing airplanes and other tools of war, such as ships.

California’s central role in producing weaponry and training military personnel continued after the war because the United States soon found itself in a cold war with the Soviet Union, one aspect of which was a hot war in Korea and later another conflict in Southeast Asia.

California also saw postwar expansions in civilian industries with steel mills, petrochemical plants, auto assembly lines and multiple other factories. However, by the 1970s, California’s heavy industry was shrinking as one-by-one the plants that had employed hundreds of thousands of workers shut down, with the last remaining major manufacturing industry, aerospace, drying up as the Cold War ended in the 1990s and Pentagon contracts disappeared.

Fortunately, military research contracts and Stanford University had spawned a new industry — digital technology — centered in the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco. For many decades, it was an agricultural center. Renamed Silicon Valley, it has anchored California’s economy ever since, generating immense wealth that percolated through other economic sectors.

California’s past, present and uncertain future deserve intense political, media and academic attention because how its economy evolves will determine how well the state as a whole manages during the 21st century.

That’s why a recent announcement that the Public Policy Institute of California is creating an economic research arm is important. Hopefully, the Economic Policy Center’s research will persuade political and civic leaders to stop taking the state’s economy for granted and reconsider policies that are strangling the golden goose.

However, the center’s first paper — aimed at framing the existing economic picture — is not reassuring. It all but ignores the structural factors that threaten the economy, dwells on superficial effects, and shows a fondness for political mitigation of those effects rather than fixing the fundamentals.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Forbes magazine rates California as having the nation’s third-highest living costs behind Hawaii and Massachusetts, with $53,171 a year in average household spending for housing, health care, taxes, food and transportation.

California also has the nation’s fourth-highest level of income disparity, which explains why it also has the nation’s highest level of poverty in the Census Bureau’s supplemental calculation, which factors in the cost of living.

The Public Policy Institute of California, using a similar methodology, found that nearly a third of Californians are living in poverty or near-poverty. PPIC also says that without state and federal safety net programs, many of which were enacted in recent years by Gov. Gavin Newsom and a Democratic Legislature, the state’s poverty rate would climb by more than eight percentage points.

These data are the grist for perpetual debate in California’s political, media and academic circles over causes, effects and remedies, and the conversations will be heating up this year. The state faces multibillion-dollar budget deficits well into the future due to what appears to be a semi-permanent plateau in revenues that cannot cope with sharp increases in spending during Newsom’s governorship.

Advocates for the poor and their legislative allies are pushing Newsom and legislators to protect the safety net programs from cuts as they confront the deficit, but they will be competing with other spending categories that enjoy heavyweight political support, such as K-12 and higher education and prisons.

There’s another aspect to California’s high living costs and high poverty rates — high levels of debt that have gotten scant media and political attention.

Americans have amassed $17.3 trillion in home mortgages, auto loans, student loans, credit cards and other forms of personal debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Californians owe at least $2.5 trillion of that and perhaps as much as $3 trillion, thanks largely to its high housing costs and the large mortgages needed to handle those costs.

In fact, according to a newly released study by CreditDonkey, a personal finance website, Californians are carrying the most debt of any state, driven by an average mortgage of $422,909 for homeowner families.

Californians’ debts for student loans, auto loans and credit card balances are also fairly high, although not terribly so vis-à-vis other states. It’s mortgage debt, at least $2 trillion, that truly sets California apart from other states, although a third of the state’s homeowners don’t have mortgages.

That said, Californians seem to be handling their high debts fairly well. The state’s personal bankruptcy rate is well below the national average and a fraction of those in states, mostly in the South, with sky-high rates. However, the PPIC, using census data, found that a million of California’s 9 million renters are behind on their rent.

California’s unique combination of high living costs, high poverty and high debt makes the state something of a personal finance experiment. The test will be how people fare during the next recession.

During the Great Recession, California had one of the nation’s highest levels of mortgage defaults and repossessions, and it took years for the housing industry to climb out of the cellar.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Some call the dearth of onsite employment and the closure of dozens of stores and other businesses a “doom loop” which feeds on itself. Mayor London Breed and other officials are desperately trying to stanch the hemorrhage of workers, shoppers and businesses while coping with the heavy impact on the city’s budget.

The pandemic’s inordinate impact on San Francisco was confirmed in a new study by the University of Toronto on how well the downtowns of major U.S. and Canadian cities have recovered by examining mobile phone data. Only one of the 66 major cities studied — Las Vegas — has recaptured 100% of its pre-pandemic foot traffic, while others were as low as 53% in St. Louis, the study found.

San Francisco is among the lowest-ranked cities at 67%. However, San Francisco has only the second-lowest recovery rank among California cities. Sacramento, the state capital, is slightly lower at 66% and, ironically, a major reason for that dismal fact is the state government itself.

Prior to the pandemic, downtown Sacramento was showing signs of a renaissance after decades of efforts by city officials to make it more attractive as a place to live, work and be entertained. The construction of a new arena for the Sacramento Kings and other entertainment events, the development of new rental housing and the opening of new hotels and restaurants indicated that, at long last, downtown Sacramento was a happening place.

However, state government is Sacramento’s biggest employer and its workers are largely concentrated in and around the city’s downtown. When state agencies sent thousands of workers home, the retail businesses and restaurants that depended on their patronage were clobbered.

The shutdown also meant a sharp decline in conventions and lobbying activity which had supported hotels and eating places. A coalition of downtown businesses sent a letter to Mayor Darrell Steinberg in October 2020 saying, “there is widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other issues that are contributing to severe and worsening conditions in Sacramento’s downtown core.”

It only got worse.

A few months after the shutdown, a peaceful demonstration against police violence morphed into a violent clash in the downtown area that defaced or damaged stores and offices.

Two years later, in 2022, members of rival gangs staged a gun battle just a block from the Capitol that left six people dead — mostly bystanders who had just left a nightclub as it closed.

The killings and the street violence sent a negative message to Sacramento-area residents about visiting downtown. As foot traffic and business waned, downtown became a campground for the city’s homeless population.

As with San Francisco, the erosion of Sacramento’s downtown core has had a negative effect on the city’s budget. Sacramento had counted on parking lot revenues to service bonds it issued to help finance the new basketball arena, as well as hotel taxes to underwrite a massive expansion of the city-owned convention center. Both sources of revenue have shriveled and the city now faces a hefty budget deficit.

Other California cities have fared much better. San Jose, the University of Toronto study found, has restored 96% of its pre-pandemic human activity, the third highest of the 66 cities studied. Bakersfield is No. 4 at 95%. Even Oakland has recovered 74%.

The state is now telling its workers to return to their offices. But it’s still unclear whether San Francisco and Sacramento have plummeted so deeply into the abyss that recovery will even be possible.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

The Private Attorneys General Act, or PAGA, allowing employees to file suits not only for themselves but on behalf of other workers, is unique to California.

Davis’ action, an obvious payback to unions that had supported him in the recall election, ignited a political and legal struggle that will reach a climactic point in November when voters decide the fate of a business-backed ballot measure that would, in essence, repeal PAGA.

The measure’s sponsor, Californians for Fair Play and Accountability, is already running ads, contending that PAGA ill-serves employees while enriching lawyers who file class-action lawsuits.

PAGA backers — personal injury attorneys and labor unions, particularly — argue that the law is needed because the state’s labor commissioner lacks the resources to vigorously enforce workplace laws, thus allowing employers to get away with violating them.

The ballot measure duel climaxes two decades of skirmishing in the Legislature and the courts. Its advocates have, with some success, expanded the law’s reach by persuading the Legislature to enact a raft of new workplace laws that could be enforced.

The most far-reaching is the 2019 law that codified a state Supreme Court decision and tightly limited employers’ use of independent contractors, thereby converting hundreds of thousands of Californians into payroll employees. The U.S. Department of Labor recently adopted similar regulations.

Other labor law expansions passed by Gov. Gavin Newsom have included a measure protecting employees that refuse to work if they believe conditions are unsafe, and another requiring employers to disclose wage scales.

While the two sides were clashing in the Legislature, they were also fighting over the issue in federal and state courts.

In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court handed employers a partial victory by declaring that workers who signed arbitration agreements could not later file PAGA suits. A delivery driver’s PAGA suit against his employer, alleging that he was unlawfully denied reimbursement for expenses, is pending in the California Supreme Court.

The court has recently declared that trial court judges don’t have the power to toss PAGA suits because of their complexity — a case arising from an Orange County worker’s claim that his employer violated break rules. It was a setback for employers who hoped that PAGA suits could be dismissed without a trial if a judge declared them to be unmanageable.

Obviously, PAGA has not only survived various attempts by employers to shrink its reach but over the past two decades the Legislature and courts have, if anything, expanded its potential impact on employer-employee relations. A legislature allied with unions would probably continue to broaden the law’s applicability.

That’s why employers decided to take their issue to the ballot. The measure that’s qualified for the November election would repeal PAGA and, instead, beef up state enforcement of workplace rules.

Their campaign will stress the replacement provisions, labeling it the “Fair Play and Employer Accountability Act.” However, the official language for the measure stresses its repeal of PAGA, saying it “eliminates employees’ ability to file lawsuits for monetary penalties for state labor law violations,” echoing the opponents’ characterization.

The campaigns for and against the measure, therefore, will be a battle of perceptions. PAGA’s defenders will say it’s needed to protect workers from rapacious employers while its opponents will say it should be repealed to protect workers and employers from rapacious lawyers.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Despite offering six-digit starting salaries, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which operates prisons, and the California Highway Patrol are having great difficulty filling vacancies and are using TV ads to recruit new officers. They are not alone.

Throughout California, public agencies and private employers are contending with an endemic lack of workers of all kinds, from unskilled to highly educated.

School districts can’t hire enough teachers, hospitals are chronically short of nurses, state and local law enforcement agencies have vacancies they cannot fill, construction companies are begging for skilled tradesmen, and even fast food outlets can’t find enough workers despite offering as much as $20 an hour.

The shortages persist even though California has nearly a million unemployed workers, according to a new report from the Employment Development Department, and its 4.9% jobless rate is the highest of any state.

California’s worker shortage is a manifestation of interacting economic and social trends that emerged during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down much of the state’s economy four years ago to battle the dreaded disease, upwards of 3 million Californians suddenly lost their jobs.

California’s unemployment rate skyrocketed to more than 16%, displaced workers scrambled to keep roofs over their heads and food on their tables, and what had been a trickle of Californians departing to other states became a river.

When businesses reopened, they found that many of their workers had either dropped out of the labor force or migrated elsewhere, leaving jobs that went unfilled.

California’s sharp drop in population over the last few years has also meant a sharp drop in the number of Californians who are working or available for work. “Since February 2020, the state’s labor force has contracted by 240,200 workers, a 1.2% decline,” Beacon Economics notes in its analysis of EDD’s latest jobs report.

California’s labor force participation rate — the percentage of working-age adults either working or available for work — is scarcely 60%, which is mediocre at best and well under the 70% rates in some other states.

One obvious circular impact is on California’s chronic shortage of housing, which drives housing costs upward and indirectly entices California workers to migrate to states that have much lower housing costs. The strident efforts of state officials to increase homebuilding collide with a shortage of skilled construction workers.

During its period of high population growth after World War II, California could fill its need for teachers, nurses and other skilled workers by recruiting in other states, particularly those with harsh winters.

That’s no longer true, simply because living costs in California — particularly for housing — are so high. If anything, California is hemorrhaging well-educated and/or skilled workers to other states, as the latest analyses of migration data indicate.

The worker shortage negatively affects the state’s overall economy since employers are less likely to expand their operations. One factor in the state’s multibillion-dollar budget deficit is the decrease in upper-income taxpayers who are the mainstays of the state’s revenue system.

California already has too many existential issues, but a chronic shortage of workers must nevertheless be added to the list. As the final cohort of Californians born during the post-World War II baby boom reaches retirement age, the shortage could become even more acute.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Many years later, after the 40-hour work week became standard, California’s Industrial Welfare Commission decreed that farmworkers could work up to 10 hours a day or six days a week before overtime pay kicked in.

In 2016, however, years of lobbying by unions and other groups finally paid off when the Legislature decreed that the eight-hour day and 40-hour work week for agricultural labor would be phased in. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the legislation, Assembly Bill 1066, despite warnings from farm groups that it would disrupt their industry.

Recently, the University of California’s Cooperative Extension branch, which researches agricultural issues, released a study indicating that having a 40-hour work week has not been as beneficial to farmworkers as its sponsors promised.

Alexandra Hill, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, concluded that many workers who had hoped for a cornucopia of overtime pay saw their incomes reduced when employers limited them to 40 hours a week. Her study found that many workers experienced reductions in the $100-$200 range each week because farmers could not automatically pass on overtime costs to their customers.

“It’s really important to think carefully about how we can best implement policies that really benefit the people that we’re trying to (help),” Hill told The Sacramento Bee.

Hill’s research exemplifies the phenomenon of unanticipated consequences that often afflicts political actions. Legislators may have thought they could help farmworkers by giving them a 40-hour workweek but failed to consider the potential downsides when applied in the real world.

In recent years, the Legislature has been particularly prone to passing laws affecting workplace conditions — not surprisingly, given the close relationship between the Capitol’s dominant Democrats and labor unions, which seek benefits they are unable to achieve in unionization drives or negotiations with employers.

The most spectacular example was 2019 legislation that severely limited employers’ ability to use contractors, in effect converting several million workers to payroll employees.

Hill’s study was released just months after the Legislature had set new minimum wages for the fast food and medical care industries, $20 per hour for the former and $25 for the latter, to dampen threats of ballot-box wars.

As with the 2016 law on farm labor, unions and other advocates of the new minimum wages said they would lift workers in the affected industries out of poverty.

“Today California is putting a stop to the hemorrhaging of our care workforce by ensuring health care workers can do the work they love and pay their bills — a huge win for workers and patients seeking care,” Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, told CalMatters.

However, there will be real world impacts.

Fast food franchisees will adjust by hiring fewer workers, raising prices or adopting more technology, such as the self-serve kiosks now common at McDonald’s.

One effect of the health care wage bill has already surfaced. When it was passed, legislators were not given any estimates of the financial impact, but after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure, his administration said it would cost the state budget, which has a $68 billion projected deficit, about $4 billion a year split 50-50 between state and federal taxpayers. And that doesn’t include the multibillion-dollar impact on private health care providers and insurers.

On one level, it’s perfectly understandable why politicians would like to raise wages for some of the state lowest paid workers. But they shouldn’t ignore the potentially negative effects of their actions.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

“California has no peers,” Newsom declared. “California dominates.”

About 18 hours later, reality reared its ugly head. The Legislative Analyst’s Office revealed that state tax revenues are running tens of billions of dollars behind expectations due to a slowing economy, creating a monumental budget headache.

The dilemma became apparent when the November income tax filing deadline — seven months later than the original date — passed, and tax receipts for 2022 could finally be counted.

“With the recent receipt of various postponed tax payments, the impact of recent economic weakness and last year’s financial market distress on state revenues has become clearer,” the LAO authors said in a preliminary report on the state’s fiscal situation. “The postponed payments came in much weaker than anticipated.”

LAO analysts Brian Uhler, Chas Alamo and economist Seth Kerstein estimated that 2022-23 revenues are $26 billion under projections and “our updated revenue outlook anticipates collections to come in $58 billion below Budget Act projections across 2022-23 to 2024-25.”

California, they said, started seeing an economic downturn in 2022 as the Federal Reserve System raised interest rates to tame inflation.

“The number of unemployed workers in California has risen nearly 200,000 since the summer of 2022,” they added. “This has resulted in a jump in the state’s unemployment rate from 3.8 percent to 4.8 percent. Similarly, inflation-adjusted incomes posted five straight quarters of year-over-year declines from the first quarter of 2022 to the first quarter 2023.”

When Newsom and legislators finalized a 2023-24 budget in June, they knew that revenue estimates were shaky due to the postponed filing deadline, but assumed that they had a $30 billion-plus gap to bridge. They now know that the hole was much larger. As Newsom finalizes his proposed 2024-25 budget to be unveiled in January, it must account for the current shortfall plus one of similar proportions for the next fiscal year.

Automatic spending reductions triggered by a slowing economy, such as lower mandatory levels of K-12 education support, would — on paper at least — cover some of the gap. But they do little to solve the political dilemma confronting Newsom and legislators as they face pressure to maintain school spending and billions of dollars in other commitments made when the state treasury seemed to be overflowing.

They could tap the state’s reserves, currently more than $30 billion. That’s what the so-called “rainy day fund” is supposed to do when revenues flatten. However, the two-year problem is likely in the $40 billion-$50 billion range, which would quickly absorb reserves and still leave a big problem.

They could do what the state has done in decades past when periodic recessions have hammered revenues, particularly income taxes: run deficits and cover them with on- and off-the-books loans, such as temporarily cutting school aid or draining special funds.

Finally, they could do what those in the Democratic Party’s left wing have wanted to do for years: jack up personal and corporate income tax rates or impose new taxes on personal wealth.

Newsom is the political figure caught in the middle. By word and deed, he wants to concentrate on becoming a major figure in national politics, starting with being an effective surrogate for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.

“I’m here to tell the truth about the Biden-Harris record,” Newsom declared early in the debate.

Now, however, Newsom faces what could be a budget deficit of historic proportions because the economy he touted as “booming” is faltering. How he performs could define his political future.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Years of bitter conflict between Central Valley farmers and the monopolistic Southern Pacific Railroad over freight rates led to creation of a railroad commissioner’s office in 1878. It later became a commission and in 1945 morphed into the California Public Utilities Commission with broad authority to set rates for transportation services, electric power, natural gas and water supplied by privately owned utilities.

The CPUC, whose members are appointed by the governor, has become a vast bureaucracy that oversees tens of billions of dollars in service charges affecting the budgets of virtually every California household and businesses large and small.

The immensely complicated applications that utilities file for rate changes involve not only what customers must pay but how the commodities they are selling are generated or acquired. Even marginal changes can have immense financial impacts, which lead to intense technical, legal and political conflicts — and occasional scandals.

Even if it attempts to act dispassionately, the CPUC is seemingly caught between two mandates: protecting consumers’ interests in having dependable and fairly priced services while providing utilities and their shareholders with profits sufficient to borrow money and attract investment capital.

The recent conflict over rooftop solar panels is a case in point. While it angered solar panel suppliers and their customers, the PUC’s decision to make home installations less lucrative responded to its mandate to protect utilities’ long-term finances.

Another example is the CPUC’s recent decision to grant Pacific Gas & Electric an overall 13% rate increase, citing the giant corporation’s precarious financial situation because of liabilities for disastrous wildfires and new mandates to put rural transmission lines underground.

Californians’ electric utility rates are already among the nation’s highest, so increasing their bills is understandably unpopular, drawing the ire of editorialists and consumer advocates. However, the CPUC essentially endorsed PG&E’s contention that higher rates are needed to protect its long-term financial health.

The wildfires that plague PG&E and other utilities have also upset California’s fire insurance market, which offers another example of the trade-offs involved in regulating the prices of services and commodities.

Seven of the state’s 12 largest fire insurers have either frozen or reduced their customer bases, saying that the threat of future wildfires must be included in premiums to maintain a viable insurance market.

That’s forced increasing numbers of homeowners in fire-prone regions to rely on the state’s last-ditch FAIR insurance program, which has very high premiums and tight coverage limits, and itself could be clobbered by future fires.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators punted the issue to Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, who appears ready to allow insurers to include estimates of future wildfire liability in their premiums, and also the cost of reinsurance, in return for offering more coverage and removing the pressure on FAIR.

Lara is taking heavy fire from consumer groups, particularly Consumer Watchdog, and some Democratic political figures. Lara’s plan would raise rates, but the alternative is having more insurers abandon the state, devastating the real estate market since mortgage companies require insurance.

Finally, there is rent control, which advocates say is needed to protect renters from rapacious landlords. But imposing limits on rent increases could also discourage investment in new rental housing, which California desperately needs.

The tortured history of rent control is likely to add another chapter next year in the form of a statewide ballot measure that would give local governments the power to regulate rents.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.

Briefly, SB 365 declares that when an employer loses a civil suit seeking to compel arbitration in a labor law dispute with a worker, the employer is not automatically allowed to freeze proceedings in the underlying issue by filing an appeal.

Thus, the measure weakens the long-standing ability of employers to require arbitration of such disputes, which flows from a pro-arbitration federal law, and is a significant victory for unions and lawyers who specialize in pursuing employment cases for workers.

Ironically, however, as the bill was winding its way through the Legislature this year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that appeals of disputes over the applicability of arbitration in federal courts should freeze (stay, in legal jargon) the underlying cases.

In June, a legislative staff analysis of SB 365 warned legislators that the then-pending Supreme Court case “presents the potential for a more direct conflict with this bill.” The Supreme Court made its ruling on June 23, when the bill was awaiting a vote in the Assembly, but its sponsors proceeded anyway, finally sending it to Newsom on Sept. 13.

Business groups strongly opposed SB 365 and the state Chamber of Commerce placed it on its “job killer” list. But it was a high priority measure for unions and one of only a few such bills to be passed and signed this year.

Given the Supreme Court’s pro-arbitration ruling, it’s likely that business groups will challenge SB 365 in court, thus joining many other legal and political jousts over California labor laws.

A major front in the running conflict was the iconic 2018 state Supreme Court decision that millions of workers who had been classified as independent contractors were entitled to be treated as payroll employees.

That ruling sparked legislation (Assembly Bill 5) that specified, category by category, who would be affected. It also spurred a successful effort by rideshare companies such as Uber and Lyft in 2020 to persuade voters to exempt their contract drivers.

Another front is a unique-to-California, 20-year-old law called the Private Attorney General Act, or PAGA, which empowers workers to file class-action lawsuits against employers alleging labor law violations.

A particularly contentious point of PAGA is whether workers who sign pre-employment arbitration agreements can still bring PAGA actions. In one case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled they cannot, but this year the state Supreme Court declared that in at least some instances they can, roiling the legal waters even more.

This year, meanwhile, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a 2019 state law, sponsored by unions, making it illegal for employers to require potential employees to sign arbitration agreements, reversing an earlier ruling on the same issue. It declared that the law violated the federal law’s preference that employment disputes be settled by arbitration rather than lawsuits.

Finally, California business groups have placed an initiative on the 2024 ballot that would repeal PAGA altogether, alleging that it fattens lawyers’ wallets without doing much for workers. Tens of millions of dollars are likely to be spent by rival business and union groups, with support for the latter from employment attorneys.

Did you get all of that? There’ll be a test later — in November 2024.

Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.