Occupational safety: high-exposure trigger tasks on artificial stone.

Senator Menjivar guides SB 20, with Assembly Member Celeste Rodriguez as the principal coauthor and Assembly Member Kalra as a coauthor, toward a targeted framework that regulates artificial-stone work by expanding the scope of enforceable health protections for silica exposure and creating a dedicated regime around high-exposure tasks. The bill adds silicosis and silica-related lung cancer to the list of conditions treated as “serious injury or illness” and establishes a new chapter focused on artificial stone in the Labor Code to govern dust suppression, training, and enforcement.

A core set of amendments and additions redefines the enforcement landscape and the technical vocabulary governing exposure. The bill expands the meaning of “serious injury or illness” to include silicosis and silica-related lung cancer in sections that define serious injury and prescribe related enforcement. It creates a specific category of “high-exposure trigger tasks” for artificial-stone fabrication, prohibits dry methods, and requires wet methods to suppress dust, with a prohibition on continued work via an immediate order for noncompliance. It enumerates a set of pre-citation considerations and a standardized alleged-violation-description process before issuing serious-violation citations. The definition of “fabrication shop” is tied to activities involving artificial stone, with explicit exclusions for certain facilities, and the framework introduces potential penalties and appeals consistent with existing enforcement structures.

The bill also codifies training and public-health coordination as central components. Employers must ensure training for workers performing high-exposure tasks and, beginning July 1, 2026, submit an annual electronic attestation to the Division that training has occurred, with prohibitions on false attestations. It creates a structured interaction with the State Department of Public Health, requiring DPH to treat silicosis reports as serious illnesses, notify the Division, and share case data and silica-exposure results in defined timeframes, while protecting confidentiality. In turn, the Division must investigate when DPH reports, notify DPH of enforcement-detected cases, and share data in a controlled fashion, including de-identified information for research with appropriate protections. The act also authorizes DPH to undertake targeted activities—identifying high-risk businesses, providing outreach, and assisting local health jurisdictions—with confidentiality protections for personal information. Some provisions—such as the baseline operative date for the enforcement framework and the phased attestation timeline—anchor immediate and future compliance, including a 2023 operative baseline for the serious-violation presumption and related procedures, and a 2026 milestone for attestation.

Contextualized within the California OSH regime, SB 20 broadens the regulatory toolbox for silica exposure in a tightly scoped segment of the industry while preserving the existing enforcement architecture. It envisions closer public-health collaboration, data-sharing with privacy safeguards, and a potential local-program impact managed through penalties and stop-work authorities. Legislative findings emphasize the health risks of crystalline silica exposure, the demographic characteristics of affected workers, and international trends toward stricter controls, situating the bill within a broader occupational-safety policy landscape and underscoring the aims of surveillance, prevention, and accountability without prescribing broader social-policy conclusions.