I agree, but even with those facts considered, the socialists still don't understand that they are destroying their core Labor-cushion, the salaried job.
Take my business, for example. My company provides two services, programming and technical staffing. When I get a new software contract, however, I don't rush out to hire new programmers. Instead, I bid out the work to see if my competition is hungry-enough to do this one new job. If they aren't, then I farm out the work to programmers who've worked with me in the past on a contract basis. Only when I can't find reasonable contractors or outsourcing do I try to hire an in-house salaried employee to knock-out the programming work.
Likewise, when one of my client firms needs extra staff, I pay my recruiters a commission for finding said staff. Other staffing firms might pay their recruiters a salary.
But why? Why pay people a salary for their "time" at work? Why not simply pay people for their performance? Find the right programmer for my client, get paid a commission. I don't care how much or how little time my recruiters spend hunting down good candidates, so why pay my recruiters a salary for that time?
I do care that they find good candidates, so why not pay them for their production? Which is of course what I do. They find the right candidate and then they get a commission.
And with no "salary", I'm in no more danger of this California-style piece of socialistic "family leave" law than I would be of paying a plumber to not fix a leak in my house for six weeks while he spent time with his family.
This trend can be extrapolated, too. Why pay secretaries a salary (and be "on the hook" for laws like the one in this thread) when you can pay them based upon how many documents they type up? Why pay salesmen salaries for their time (and be "on the hook" for laws like the one in this thread) when you can pay them based upon how much they sell? Why pay geologists for their time (and be "on the hook" for laws like the one in this thread) when you can pay them for the oil that they find?
Alvin Toffler talks about this very thing in his magnificent tome Future Shock of 30+ years ago. Laws like the one in this thread will hasten the demise of salaried jobs, to be replaced by contracting and other forms of payments-for-performance.
How many California sports teams are going to be competitive nationally when football, baseball, and basketball players on those teams take six weeks of "family leave" in the middle of the season, with the LAW requiring that their jobs remain open to them when they return?
California is killing the salaried job, one law at a time. Lord only knows how they are going to handle paying attorneys for taking 6 weeks off. Are past clients going to be on the hook, or will the state simply borrow more money to pay Tobacco-company-level payouts? With the right timing, trial attorneys and sports players could very well extend their lucrative careers by six paid work-free weeks, all at the tax-payers and/or past clients' expense.
Paying people for NOT working has always been a bad idea (ridiculous and predictable sob-stories notwithstanding). Perhaps this law will bring that fact more clearly out into the open...