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New Laws for 2020: Assembly Bill 979 (California)

 

This has certainly been a busy end of 2020 for a lot of new legislation, hasn’t it?  On September 30th, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 979 into law which requires diversity quotas on the boards of publicly traded companies.

Assembly Bill 979, which applies to public domestic or foreign companies that have principal executive offices in the state, requires that these companies have at least one director from an “underrepresented community” on their board by the end of 2021.  Readers might be wondering who would qualify as coming from an “underrepresented community.”  Assembly Bill 979 identifies these board directors as anyone who self identifies as “Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.”

For those wondering, companies that fail to comply with this legislation risk being fined anywhere from $100,000 to $300,000.  Employers in California that fall within the scope of Assembly Bill 979 have a bit of time to come into compliance with this law, but I would suggest steps be taken to ensure compliance sooner rather than later as the fines could get to be quite steep.


For a copy of Assembly Bill 979:  https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB979

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