Senate Bill 947 would pile on costs for my restaurant and other small businesses

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OPINION — It’s not easy owning a restaurant in California. High operating costs, taxes, rising food inflation, permitting red tape, and workforce shortages have kept me on my toes over the last few years since I opened Heroic Italian in Berkeley and San Francisco.

In this environment, state leaders should be exploring ways to make restaurants and small businesses easier and more affordable to operate. Yet, lawmakers in Sacramento are pushing forward Senate Bill 947, a bill that would make it harder and more burdensome for me to pay my bills.

While being sold as taking down “robo-bosses” and limiting the use of AI in the workplace, in reality, SB 947 impacts regular tools I use every day to save time and money. Nobody would consider point-of-sale systems for restaurants or automated spreadsheets to be cutting-edge AI. But under SB 947, those tools would be micromanaged by a state law that makes it harder to run my business.

Here’s what the impact of SB 947 looks like in practice: At my restaurant, I use software such as Google Suite and Microsoft Excel to assist with day-to-day decisions including worker schedules, pay and benefits. If SB 947 passes, restaurant owners like me will have to worry about how and whether this new law applies to software with automated features like Excel. The bill is written so broadly that I would need to review every system and tool I use, and the workflows to use them. Consulting with expensive legal advisers to determine which ones the bill covers would require taking on more compliance costs by creating technical legal notices and disclosures.

I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have a dedicated HR manager — I’m a restaurateur and entrepreneur. The disclosures required by this law would likely force me to spend money to hire a lawyer and even an HR manager.

I’m also worried about how SB 947 could undermine the trust and relationships I’ve built with my customers. The bill would make it harder to stop bad actors from getting removed from delivery platforms, which play a major role in my restaurant’s business. While the vast majority of delivery workers are reliable, every time a bad actor fails to deliver an order or commits other kinds of fraud, we lose an order and a customer gets a bad impression of my business, threatening the credibility in our community that we’ve worked so hard to build. There are already California laws that protect delivery workers from getting reprimanded by mistake or arbitrarily, so SB 947 would unnecessarily tie platforms’ hands from taking swift action to address fraud, and everyone will lose — the customer, the platform and, especially, my restaurant and reputation.

Advocates for this bill claim it is just about stopping robots from firing people, and that is a fair concern. But in California, our workers already have some of the strongest privacy and AI protections in the nation. Our state laws, supported by California voters like me, already led to new regulations developed by experts over several years that ensure there’s human oversight over management decisions like discipline or firing.

But instead of building on those policies, SB 947 piles on rules that are difficult to understand and implement, especially for small businesses, and may require expensive legal help. The bill ignores the thoughtful protections already in place for workers and adds more costly red tape and compliance burdens for small business owners and restaurants without creating meaningful new safeguards for my team — or yours.

In an already tough industry, California’s restaurants are struggling, and our legislative leaders shouldn’t add expensive burdens to operating a small business. We can maintain and build upon the safeguards we have without adding costs, but SB 947 fails to strike that balance.

I hope to open more locations, and want to continue serving good food, feeding our community and growing our business. For Heroic Italian and all other independent restaurants that make our state so special, I urge our lawmakers to vote no on SB 947.

David Bullitt is the restaurant owner of Heroic Italian in San Francisco and Berkeley.