California lawmakers advanced a worker-protection bill that would force state and local public employers to give 45 days' written notice before deploying AI within unionised job classifications. AB 2656 passed the Assembly 72 to 2 on 26 May and cleared the Senate Labor committee 5-0 on 17 June1, and now sits with the Senate Privacy committee. It is narrower than the broader bills tracked here: it covers only public-sector union classifications, where SB 951 would reach any workforce facing 25%-plus displacement.
The bill's sharpness comes from attaching the notice trigger to union job classifications rather than a headcount threshold. That routes AI governance through existing collective-bargaining machinery, which gives organised labour an enforceable warning window rather than a percentage rule a company can dispute.
The state's docket is filling alongside it. AB 2545, which would have the Employment Development Department collect AI-impact data, also cleared Senate Labor 5-0 on 17 June and is furthest along. SB 947 has a Senate Labor hearing set for 23 June. Floor votes on SB 951 and SB 947 have not been taken and are unlikely before the summer recess. California matters because other states copy what it passes, so the early-warning rights Washington has not legislated are accumulating in Sacramento and Albany instead.
