California poised to endanger public safety with SB 1203

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OPINION — A few years ago, California lawmakers set out to help fast food workers by raising their minimum wage. The intention was good, but the result was not what anyone promised.

Restaurants facing higher labor costs didn’t just absorb them. They automated around them. Walk into a McDonald’s today and there’s a good chance you’ll place your order on a touchscreen, not with a person. Kiosks and mobile apps appeared because restaurants couldn’t afford the huge spike in wages at the same time food costs were skyrocketing. The workers the law was meant to help ended up with fewer jobs to apply for, not better ones.

Now Sacramento is poised to run the same experiment on a sector where the stakes are a lot higher than how fast you get your fries. Licensed security guards are the trained presence standing between an ordinary day and an emergency. Run the fast food playbook on this sector, and the result isn’t a kiosk taking your order. It’s fewer trained professionals standing watch where it matters most.

SB 1203 would raise wages for security guards by reconstituting the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC), a body that has sat dormant since 2004, handing it broad authority to set pay across the industry. Combined with other mandated costs in the bill, the price tag comes to roughly $2 billion a year. These increases will lead to higher security costs for organizations contracting for these services, like hospitals, malls, school districts, and government buildings. The IWC isn’t required to weigh whether they can absorb a mandated wage increase, and it can set wages with no accountability for what happens next.

Here’s the part that should worry everyone, regardless of how they feel about wages. When costs go up this much, this fast, organizations don’t just pay more for services. They look for ways to pay less. And for the security workforce, “paying less” usually means one of two things, neither of them good.

The first is swapping licensed, trained guards for unlicensed workers who haven’t gone through the background checks, use of force training, or de-escalation instruction the state currently requires. The second is leaning harder on cameras and AI driven surveillance systems that can flag a problem on a screen but can’t physically de-escalate a fight in a parking lot or walk an elderly visitor to their car at night.

California has roughly 330,000 licensed security professionals. They’re the people who notice the person who doesn’t belong, who talk someone down before a situation becomes a 911 call, who are present in thousands of ordinary places like transit stations, concerts, construction sites, and apartment complexes, where something occasionally goes wrong. They are not a luxury, they’re essential.

And the timing couldn’t be worse. SB 1203, Sacramento’s own Olympic wage mandate, takes effect July 1, 2028, a mere two weeks before the LA Olympic Games begin. The Los Angeles City Council already pulled back a similarly timed hotel wage hike rather than risk its Olympics readiness. Sacramento didn’t get the memo.

This is exactly the moment the state should be building a deep bench of professional guards, not adding a costly mandate that gives those organizations a reason to scale back on professional security.

An unelected commission should not have unlimited power to raise wages with no justification and no accountability for the downstream impacts. That’s not a wage policy. That’s a blank check, and California has seen where blank checks like this lead.

Lawmakers cannot afford to repeat that mistake. The fast-food experiment cost jobs. This one could cost public safety.

We urge the Legislature to slow down, take a hard look at what SB 1203 will actually cost, and oppose it.

David Chandler is the president of the California Association of Licensed Security Agencies, Guards & Associates.