Babysitting bill in Calif. Legislature
 

How will parents react when they find out they will be expected to provide workers' compensation benefits, rest and meal breaks and paid vacation time for…babysitters? Dinner and a movie night may soon become much more complicated.

Assembly Bill 889 (authored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, will require these protections for all “domestic employees,” including nannies, housekeepers and caregivers.

The bill has already passed the Assembly and is quickly moving through the Senate with blanket support from the Democrat members that control both houses of the Legislature – and without the support of a single Republican member. Assuming the bill will easily clear its last couple of legislative hurdles, AB 889 will soon be on its way to the Governor's desk.

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers' compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

SOURCE

Except that baby sitters, in the traditional sense of high-school girl babysitting on a Friday evening is expressly excluded from the provisions of this bill.

Chapter 1, section 1451 paragraph 2 g of AB 889

The source of the article you cited is a Republican State Senator. The source is inaccurate in his interpretation of AB 889

Besides, any sitter over 18 is probably a professional and would demand those things anyway, which is why 15-year-olds are the best. Also, sixteen-year-olds suddenly have better things to do on a Friday night than watch somebody's kids.

So this Republican is objecting to a bill that might make it harder to hire illegal immigrants for domestic work

Republicans in California are a big joke; everytime they try to do anything, it just seems to blow up in their faces. They recently pushed very hard to get an initiative passed to take away congressional redistricting from the long-time Democrat-held state legislature and turn redistricting over to a bi-partisan, non-legislative panel. The panel just completed its re-mapping of the distrcts and the Republicans came up on the short end of the stick. Instead of the hoped for Texas-like gains as seen in that state's redistricting, the Democrats retained their dominance and may gain more seats as a result of the new map. The California Republicans simply did not do the math: they are numerically the lesser of the two major parties, especially in the larger urban centers of the state. The California GOP (CGOP) has a long history of backing flawed candidates, flawed legislation, and of acceding to the more extreme right, religious portion of the party. If the national GOP wants to see what the long-term effects of bowing to the far right could be to its national aspirations, they have only to look at the microcosm of the CGOP. They have given the state they only county to formally declare bankruptcy (Orange County [home of Disneyland] in 1994) and the lagest county bankruptcy in U.S. histor;y a couple of embarassing U.S. Senators (George Murphy, a former actor/song & dance man, and S.I. Haykawa who was primarily known for continually falling asleep in the Senate and during hearings); a slew of elected state officials who have been involved in all manner of scandal; a Governor who fell back, repudiating the hoped for goals of the CGOP [Schwarzenegger]; and, the list goes on and on. Orange County, once the stronghold of conservative CGOP politics is more and more moving into the Democratic camp, all while Orange County is faring better finacially and in employment than the adjacent Democratic Los Angeles County. If the CGOP wants to correct its course, it will have to give up nits releince on religious-based issues (abortion, homosexuality, school prayer, etc.) and start producing tangible, concrete economic results. This also holsd true for the national GOP. They must stop harping on issues the vast majority of the voting public do not care for (depending on the issue, 2/3-3/4 of the electorate oppose many, if not most of the non-economic CGOP issues) and get to work on the true voter's concerns: "It's the economy, stupid!"

Oh, and before some CGOP adherent can bring up the now-tired claim of "Well, we had Ronald Reagan!...", it should be pointed out Regan was the target of a recall effort in his first term as Governor of California and when he left office (there were no term limits during his time in office), he did so to aviod the embarassment of a sure loss to the Democratic candidate, Jerry Brown, who has recently been elected again to the Governor' Office after leaving office in 1983. The loss would have firmly positioned him as "non-electible" after losing the GOP Presidential nomination to Nixon in 1968 and Ford in 1976...