California’s 2023 Labor Session: Newsom’s Wins and Losses

California closed its 2023 legislative cycle with a labor record that resists a single headline. Organized labor entered the year on a confident footing, riding a national wave of strike activity and a sympathetic supermajority in Sacramento, and it left with several of the most consequential worker-protection statutes in a decade. Yet the same Governor who signed a $25 minimum wage for health care workers also rejected the bill labor wanted most, the one that would have let strikers draw unemployment. The result is a session best read not as a victory or a defeat but as a map of where Gavin Newsom is willing to spend political and fiscal capital on behalf of workers and where he is not.

The wins: wages, leave, and the limits of restrictive contracts

The clearest gains came on compensation. Senate Bill 525 established a sector-specific minimum wage for health care workers, phasing covered employees toward $25 per hour on schedules that vary by facility type, with the first increases taking effect June 1, 2024. Days earlier, Assembly Bill 1228 set a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide, effective April 1, 2024, and revived a Fast Food Council with authority to raise that floor further. Both measures carried the fingerprints of the Service Employees International Union, and both reflected a negotiated peace: AB 1228 in particular emerged from a deal between labor and the restaurant industry that traded a threatened referendum for a fixed wage and a narrower regulatory body.

Leave and safety law moved in parallel. Senate Bill 616 raised the statewide paid sick leave floor from three days to five, effective January 1, 2024, and lifted the accrual and carryover caps accordingly. Senate Bill 553 obligated most employers to adopt a written workplace violence prevention plan, maintain a violent-incident log, and train staff, with the operative deadline arriving July 1, 2024 under Cal/OSHA enforcement.

Noncompetes and the reach of California policy

The cycle also extended one of California’s oldest labor-market commitments: the near-total ban on employee noncompete agreements codified at Business and Professions Code section 16600. Assembly Bill 1076 declared such clauses void as a matter of law and required employers to send affected current and former employees written notice that their agreements would not be enforced, by February 14, 2024. Senate Bill 699 went further, reaching contracts signed outside the state and purporting to void them as to work performed in California regardless of where they were entered. Together the two bills converted a long-settled rule against postemployment restraints into an affirmative notification duty and a cross-border enforcement posture, a meaningful expansion even in a state that had banned noncompetes for generations.

Enforcement itself drew attention. Assembly Bill 594 authorized local prosecutors to bring civil and criminal actions for Labor Code violations independently of the Labor Commissioner, decentralizing wage-theft enforcement in a way labor advocates had sought for years.

The signature loss: unemployment for strikers

The defeat that defined the cycle for many in the movement was Senate Bill 799. The bill would have made workers eligible for unemployment insurance after two weeks on strike, a change long sought by unions and pushed hard during a year in which writers, actors, and hotel workers spent months on picket lines. Newsom vetoed it on September 30, 2023. His veto message rested on the condition of the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund, which carried billions in federal debt accumulated during the pandemic, and warned that any expansion of eligibility could deepen that obligation and raise taxes on employers. Labor leaders, including the California Labor Federation, condemned the veto as tilting the field toward employers and punishing workers for exercising a protected right.

The quieter losses

SB 799 was not alone. Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 627, which would have required chain businesses with 100 or more nationwide locations to give 60 days’ notice before closing a California site and to offer displaced workers transfer rights to nearby locations for a year. The Governor described the notice, transfer, and penalty framework as imposing significant burdens on employers. He also rejected a measure that would have extended occupational safety protections to domestic workers such as housekeepers and nannies, leaving that long-excluded workforce outside Cal/OSHA’s reach once again.

Even some of the year’s wins carried delay. Assembly Bill 1, which granted legislative staff the right to organize and bargain collectively, was signed but does not take effect until July 1, 2026, deferring the practical benefit well past the session that produced it.

Reading the pattern

A throughline connects the signatures and the vetoes. Newsom approved measures whose costs fall primarily on private employers through wages, leave, and safety mandates, and whose fiscal exposure to the state treasury is limited. He balked where a bill would draw directly on a strained public fund or, in his framing, restructure private business decisions about closures and staffing. The labor movement secured durable gains for low-wage and health care workers and tightened California’s already strict line on restrictive contracts. What it did not secure was the structural change that would have altered the economics of striking itself, and that omission is likely to define the next several cycles more than any single statute signed in 2023.

For workers and employers tracking these obligations, several effective dates in early 2024 turn statute into compliance, and the vetoed measures are nearly certain to return in amended form. Readers following California’s labor and employment docket can track those developments through the journal’s ongoing commentary and case tracker; related questions about workplace surveillance and remote-work protections are taken up in earlier analysis of employee privacy rights while working from home. This publication offers commentary and analysis, not legal advice; those facing specific obligations under these statutes should consult qualified counsel.