The California state legislature has taken the next step in its multi-year effort to identify and address the impact of slavery and anti-Black racism in the state. Now, major companies that operate within California may soon be required to officially acknowledge the ways in which they participated in and benefited from slavery as the state continues to explore reparations.
Recently passed bill requires large California companies to disclose past ties to slavery
California’s legislature recently passed Assembly Bill 2599, which requires large companies in the state to publicly disclose their history of involvement in slavery. Specifically, these companies must search their records and verify whether or not the companies, as well as any predecessor or subsidiary companies, “bought or sold persons subjected to slavery, used persons subjected to slavery as collateral, provided loans to purchase persons subjected to slavery, insured such transactions or the persons subjected to slavery, or provided related or other services to aid or otherwise facilitate those transactions.” The information disclosed by these companies will be displayed on a “public, digital platform” to be created for this purpose. The slavery disclosure requirement only applies to companies operating in California that were in existence in some form before December 1964 and that currently have “annual worldwide gross receipts” of more than $100,000,000.
Hurdles to overcome to implement disclosure policy
As the Sacramento Bee details, this new bill was passed over the objections of a number of companies operating in California. In particular, major insurance companies argued that the new set of requirements was unnecessary given a preexisting law that has required them to disclose whether or not they issued insurance policies to slaveholders that compensated them for injuries or deaths of people they enslaved. Even though the bill has been passed by the legislature, the new slavery disclosure requirement still has to clear key hurdles to be implemented. First, Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to either sign the bill into law or veto it. Newsom has a mixed track record with the state’s reparations efforts, approving of some measures and vetoing others. Second, the legislature will have to allocate money for the process. And finally, the digital platform, run by the California Civil Rights Department, must be created to house and display the information being submitted. Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, one of the sponsors of the legislation, expressed confidence that the administrative details would be worked out. “This is not big dollars,” Bryan insisted, “And it’s not something that’s not going to happen.”
Latest step in California’s reparations process
The slavery disclosure requirement and the online digital platform to be created for this information are the latest steps in a years-long reparations process that was first initiated in California in 2020. Since then, the state has made significant progress while still lacking in many areas. The California Reparations Task Force issued its final report in 2023, leading to more than a dozen related bills being proposed the following year. In 2024, the state set aside $12 million for potential reparations, though critics argued that this sum was a fraction of the billions of dollars that would be necessary to fund reparations in the state. Some measures have been explicitly rejected. The state legislature shelved bills that would have created the administrative structure and allocated the necessary resources to implement a wide-scale reparations policy, and Gov. Newsom vetoed a bill that would have given preferential college admissions to descendants of enslaved persons. Meanwhile, some governments within California, such as Alameda County, have approved their own reparations measures.
While California’s reparations process has had mixed results in the six years since it was initiated, the state has made some progress in addressing the impact of slavery and anti-Black racism. Now, a new policy may soon be implemented in California that forces the largest companies operating in the state to be open and transparent about if and how they participated in slavery and profited from enslaving Black people.