Crickets at EDD call center + US Labor rule conflicts with AB 5 + AG opposes trans discrimination

Good morning and welcome to your Wednesday!

FIRST UP: The Sacramento Bee’s Hannah Wiley connected with more than a dozen moms in the California Capitol to ask about how they balance politics and parenting.

Here’s what she found: The 120 legislators who help write the laws governing California workplaces are largely allowed to establish their own cultures that influence life for parents in their offices.

The inconsistent approach has left these mothers at the mercy of the members, who may or may not believe politics and babies are mutually exclusive.

“It is incredibly unusual that somebody comes back from maternity leave and segues in nicely,” a Senate chief of staff who’s worked in the Legislature for two decades told Wiley. “It’s really hard to figure out how to balance this job with kids and new motherhood, new parenthood.”

Read more here on how Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks’ decision to bring her infant daughter to the Capitol so she could vote on the last night of the legislative session revealed what it’s like for moms in the building.

CRICKETS AT EDD CALL CENTER

The Sacramento Bee’s Wes Venteicher dug into the guts of Gov. Newsom’s strike team report on the Employment Development Department and came back with this tale about a call center that wasn’t taking many calls.

If you thought it was impossible to reach a human being about your California unemployment insurance claim in the last six months, you were nearly right, according to a recent report released by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration.

No more than one in 1,000 callers per day have reached someone at the number the Employment Development Department has told people to call for help with their claims, leaving callers “without a statistically significant chance of being served,” according to a new report from a team of government executives Newsom appointed to address problems at the department.

Members of the team visited a call center one morning in the last seven weeks and were confused about whether they had found the right place.

“When we visited the office where it is housed, and asked where the call center was, an employee speculated that perhaps it had moved to Southern California, but that was determined to be inaccurate,” the report’s authors wrote.

The team learned that the Northern California office dotted with empty cubicles wasn’t “intentionally established as a call center.” It is an office with some phones connected to the number the department has told people to call to resolve issues with their claims from 8 a.m. to noon.

During a 90-minute period, the strike team observed “four live phone calls,” two of which were determined to be fraudulent, the report says.

The visit illustrated complaints California lawmakers and jobless residents have raised for months since the coronavirus outbreak drove the state’s economy to standstill and put millions on unemployment.

Last month, Employment Development Director Sharon Hilliard told lawmakers that people contacting the department to ask about claims were waiting four to six weeks to have their calls returned. The department has a backlog of some 1.6 million unemployment claims that require some sort of verification. It estimates it won’t resolve them all until January

Read more here from Venteicher’s report on what the strike team found at the call center.

DEPARTMENT OF LABOR PROPOSES NEW RULE

The U.S. Department of Labor is weighing an employment rule that could put it in contrast to California’s AB 5 employment law and give companies more room to hire independent contractors instead of employees with benefits.

The proposed rule would define whether a person is an employee or an independent contractor by means of an “economic reality test,” according to a news story by Yahoo Finance.

“Under this test, an individual is an employee if, as a matter of economic reality, he or she is economically dependent on the employer for work. A worker is an independent contractor if, as a matter of economic reality, he or she is in business for him or herself, as opposed to being economically dependent on an employer,” a senior Labor Department official told reporters.

“In other words, the Department of Labor wants to make it easier for employers to decide that their workers aren’t employees, but independent contractors — and thus exempt from many of the protections workers have long since secured,” according to the advocacy group People’s Parity Project, which criticized the proposal as “an attempt to disempower workers, so that the government might strip their rights all the easier.”

The rule would stand in stark contrast to California, which under AB 5 recognizes many previously classified independent contractors as employees entitled to benefits.

AG CRITICIZES PROPOSAL ALLOWING TRANS DISCRIMINATION

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra joined a coalition of nearly two dozen attorneys general in condemning a proposed U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rule that would permit homeless shelter operators to discriminate against transgender and gender nonconforming individuals.

“Instead of confronting the pandemic, the Trump Administration continues to demonize and punish the most vulnerable among us,” Becerra said in a statement. “We can’t accept that. It’s going to take all of us working together and looking after each other to get through this unprecedented crisis. That includes stepping up to ensure transgender Americans can access shelter and critical social services.”

Becerra and the other state attorneys general called on Secretary Ben Carson to withdraw the proposal.

“Nobody should be forced out onto the street because of the Trump Administration’s bigotry,” Becerra said.

The proposed rule allows certain HUD programs, including single-sex homeless shelters, to craft policies allowing them to refuse services to individuals based on such factors as “height, the presence (but not the absence) of facial hair, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other physical characteristics,” according to Becerra’s office.

“As a result, the proposed rule will subject all individuals seeking shelter in single-sex facilities, including cisgender individuals, to unwarranted and unwelcome scrutiny of their physical appearance, particularly if they do not fit into certain gender stereotypes,” the statement said.

Becerra joins the attorneys general for Illinois, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia in opposing the proposed rule.

You can read the letter here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“200,000.”

- Gov. Gavin Newsom, via Twitter, observing a somber COVID-19 milestone.

Best of the Bee:

• California residents will be able to vote in three different ways this year, according to representatives from seven California counties who gathered on Tuesday to announce their multi-county partnership to increase voting access, via Ashley Wong.

• Four University of California campuses unfairly admitted at least 64 students between academic years 2013-14 and 2018-19 because of their connections to donors and university staff, according to a report released by the California State Auditor on Tuesday, via Jeong Park.

• A Central Valley Republican lawmaker hasn’t asked for the same pay cut California state workers are taking despite saying on social media that a request had been made on his behalf, via Wes Venteicher.