SB 1203 ties training to union contracts. That’s the wrong tool for a real problem.

The story

A bill from State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, SB 1203, advanced through a Senate committee this spring. As reported by CalMatters, the measure would require private security companies to reach a labor contract before they could provide their own use-of-force training, and it would also raise guard pay and mandate more rigorous training. The senator argues that guards average roughly $44,000 a year — near the poverty line — while the industry generates an estimated $34 billion in revenue. Security companies counter that the bill would add at least $1 billion a year in costs and leave fewer guards protecting the public.

My take

The underlying problem is real. Guard pay is too low and training is uneven across the state. But bolting use-of-force training to a union contract is a strange mechanism. It does not, by itself, raise a single guard’s wage or improve a single hour of instruction. What it does is hand organizing leverage to unions and pull licensed employers and licensed trainers out of a training pipeline they have run for years.

You can raise standards and pay without building a bottleneck that mainly benefits one party. I’d rather see a clean increase in the training requirement and the wage floor, funded honestly, than a backdoor that chains a safety requirement to a labor negotiation. Supporters will say this is the only leverage that has ever moved this industry on pay, and that point deserves a fair hearing.

Either way, watch this one closely. If it passes as written, every PPO in California will feel it.