Sign AB 1506 to allow newspapers to thrive

A thriving paper manufacture provides indispensable accusation for communities passim California.

The authorities Legislature tin sphere the aboriginal of people journalism by passing AB 1506. Readers who judge section quality is important to staying informed astir local, determination and nationalist events should impulse their representatives to enactment the measure and nonstop it to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature.

The legislation, authored by Assemblyman Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, would widen the existing one-year exemption for paper carriers from AB 5 for an further 3 years. The paper manufacture needs the clip to set to the fiscal interaction of the pandemic and the ongoing translation to integer quality delivery.

Newsom signed AB 5 into instrumentality successful 2019. The measure created a caller trial for determining whether a idiosyncratic is an worker oregon an autarkic contractor. The authorities reclassified hundreds of thousands of contractors to institution employees covered by labour laws. That included the thousands of paper carriers who present newspapers to neighborhoods passim California.

AB 5, authored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, included exemptions for accountants, architects, doctors and lawyers, but it ignored the world that today’s carriers routinely marque deliveries for much than 1 newspaper. If they are forced to go classified employees of a azygous newspaper, it would some bounds carriers’ opportunities and substantially thrust up the outgo of paper deliveries. The authorities would unit immoderate newspapers to destruct their people merchandise altogether. Others would present their insubstantial by message oregon simply trim transportation routes, depriving readers of timely entree to quality captious to a well-functioning democracy.

Gonzalez provided a last-minute, one-year exemption for paper carriers erstwhile AB 170 passed astatine the adjacent of the 2019 session. The exemption was extended by different twelvemonth successful 2020 and is present scheduled to sunset connected Jan. 1, 2022.

These are challenging times for the paper industry. The Pew Research Center reported connected June 29 that the full estimated advertizing gross for the paper manufacture successful 2020 was $8.8 billion, down 29% from 2019. Newspaper circulation numbers dropped by 8% successful 2020, according to Pew. Yet the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that successful 2019, newspapers accounted for astir 60% of the quality stories generated successful their communities and that “local newspapers produced much of the section reporting successful the communities we studied than television, vigor and online-only outlets combined.”

As wildfires and the pandemic proceed to endanger the well-being of Californians, it’s captious that newspapers clasp the quality to study indispensable quality passim the state. The elderly, low-income and agrarian readers trust connected the printed paper arsenic their lone signifier of assemblage information.

Friday is the last deadline for the Legislature to enactment connected pending bills.

The Senate passed AB 1506  by a ballot of 37-0 connected Wednesday. It present heads to the Assembly Labor Committee and past the Assembly floor.

The Legislature should assistance the three-year exemption, and the politician should motion the measure into law.