Small business owners from across Southern California are planning a protest in Pasadena on Tuesday in front of Assemblymember Chris Holden’s district office to protest against State Bill 553, which picket organizers say will impose a devastating burden on them.

The bill, introduced by Senator Dave Cortese, seeks to establish complex new workplace violence prevention standards. It has already passed the state Senate and could pass in the State Assembly by Sept. 1.

Picket organizers emphasize that SB 553 would wield a significant impact on small businesses.

Rima Madan, owner of convenience stores in Pasadena and Arcadia, has launched a Change.org petition in protest of the bill and “to protect small business customers, employees and owners.”

The bill requires every California employer with at least one employee to create, implement, and maintain a workplace violence prevention plan to protect employees and other personnel from aggressive and violent behavior at the workplace. The plan must identify potential risk factors for each facility, department, or operation. Under SB 553, employers would be prohibited from forcing non-security employees to confront active shoplifters or enter confrontational situations with intruders engaged in criminal activity who may be armed. The bill also requires employers to provide active shooter training to all non-healthcare workers and maintain a log of violent incidents.

Madan said that originally this bill was supposed to be for the healthcare industry where nurses and staff are trained to handle psychiatric patients, drug addicts, and violent patients. Now, they’re trying to push the same thing onto small businesses. She said that this doesn’t make sense for small businesses at all and that it would require a significant investment on their part.

“Most of our employees are minimum wage, so that could put a lot of burden on the small retailers. Now we are required to have logs, maintain logs of violent incidences and post incident investigation laws. And according to this bill, we are required to give active shooter training to our employees,” Madan said.

Businesses would also be required to hire security guards under the bill. Madan said this and most of the other new requirements in the bill would require a significant investment on the part of small businesses.

“If I do not maintain any of these records, then I do not follow any of these guidelines,” she said. “According to this SB 553, I will be penalized $18,000 for the first offense. So now the criminals are let loose and the store owner becomes the criminal because we didn’t follow the guideline of keeping all these records.”

“We talked to one of the authors of the bill and he said, ‘well, the owners can become security guards.’ So that means I will have to go and take training to become a security guard now,” Madan said. “This doesn’t make sense for small business at all. The turnover and the shoplifters don’t care what kind of training and what kind of logs you have. They’ll still come – and I mean are you going to stop them? No.”