California Democrats who have rarely, if ever, come across a soft-on-crime bill they didn’t like are now pushing a union-backed anti-self-checkout bill that supporters say would combat crime, increase worker safety, and decrease incidents of alleged racism.
The Retail Theft Prevention and Safe Staffing Act, otherwise known as Senate Bill 1446, was introduced earlier this year by Democrat state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (Los Angeles) and has gotten renewed attention in light of the retail chains that have made announcements in recent weeks noting adjustments to their self-checkout policies.
“This act will protect workers and the public by ensuring safe staffing levels at grocery and drug stores and regulating self-checkout machines in a way that’s being smart on crime,” Smallwood-Cuevas has claimed.
Here are the things it would mandate if signed into law:
The proposed law would prohibit grocery and drug stores from using self-checkout machines unless they do the following:
The bill is, of course, backed by union groups that have long opposed self-checkout lanes. One of them, the United Food and Commercial Workers, says the bill would help combat the supposed racism that is allegedly inherent in the storing of certain popular items under lock and key:
The bill also bans items with theft-deterrence measures from being purchased at self-checkout, even with an employee deactivating such a device. The union, which seems to aim to reduce the number of locked up items through the bill by increasing labor costs for deactivating anti-theft devices, blames racism, not theft, for the use of anti-theft devices.
“The types of products that are locked up, and in which stores, also indicate racial bias, rightfully angering customers who see that stores are unfairly targeting them,” the union continued.
Smallwood-Cuevas, a former labor organizer, has admitted she doesn’t believe penalizing criminals makes Californians safer and also conceded that her bill is primarily about hiring more workers:
“We have so many bills in this Legislature that are trying to increase penalties,” Smallwood-Cuevas told me. “We know that what makes our community safe is not more jail time and penalties. What makes our community safe is real enforcement, having real workers that are on the floor.”
That is an absolutely astonishing statement coming from an elected official in California, considering all the documented instances of smash and grabs and flash mobs, not to mention the brazen thieves who just waltz right in with trash bags in hand and proceed to stuff them full of items they have no intention of purchasing, bypassing the checkout lanes altogether.
In my view, it’s not a coincidence that this bill is under consideration when one recalls how some businesses in the state had no choice but to switch to self-checkout, reduce hours, and/or lay people off at some of their locations after the minimum wage for fast food workers rose to $20 in April:
This doesn’t mean they’ll repeal the minimum wage edict that created the problem. No – they’ll just put forth new laws like SB1446. A proposed state law could change regulations on self-checkout, forcing some stores to do away with the service altogether.Just after many businesses made the expensive long-term move to automation and kiosks, they’ll still be forced to hire and pay people $20 an hour on top of it anyway. Or they can just close their doors and go out of business.
Further, if Smallwood-Cuevas and the other Democrats who support this legislation were genuinely concerned about retail crime, there’s one big thing they could do – but won’t:
“Either way, retailers lose on this bill,” retail legal advisor William Friedlander told the Globe on Monday. “If this passes, stores will greatly reduce the number of self-checkouts. That means less retail theft, but yeah, also long lines and stores having to hire a ton of more workers. If it doesn’t pass, self-checkouts are saved as is, but retail thefts continue.”“The solution behind all this would be to change around Proposition 47, lower that $950 felony amount to the average that stores lose in retail theft, and bring back justice that way. That’s honestly the overarching way to fix this. But it is, and instead we have SB 1446 giving a ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ ultimatum. And yeah, we have seen both sides really put more resources into this recently for that reason. But no one wants to bring up the reason why all this is happening, Prop. 47. The author should have focused on that instead.”
The man has a point. Maybe once California gets done regulating gender-neutral toy sections and dipping their noses into other states’ business, and cities like San Francisco discover that their $5 million/year “free alcohol to the homeless” programs might not be such a good idea, they’ll get around to addressing the Prop. 47 issue. Until then…
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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