A Colton senator is legislating against AI layoffs while the IE loses warehouse jobs the ordinary way
Citrus Belt Review: State Sen. Eloise Reyes (D-Colton) has authored SB 951, the "AI Job Killer Notice Act," which would require employers to give 90 days' notice — 30 more than the current WARN standard — before layoffs driven by artificial intelligence or automation. Sponsored by the California Federation of Labor Unions and amended in mid-May, the bill would also lower the trigger to 25 workers and force companies to tell the state when AI replaces a role. It's a forward-looking bill from a legislator in the heart of warehouse country, aimed at a wave of automation that labor analysts see coming.
The wave hasn't arrived yet — but the layoffs have, for entirely different reasons. France-based Geodis filed a WARN notice to cut 238 jobs at its Rialto warehouse by early July, on the heels of CJ Logistics cutting 71 in Fontana. The EDD logged 2,200 transportation-and-warehousing jobs lost across the IE between February and March alone. None of these is attributed to AI. The trade-press accounts tie them to softening demand, lost contracts, and consolidation — the ordinary machinery of a logistics downturn, not robots on the dock.
That gap is the story. The IE is shedding warehouse jobs the old-fashioned way while its own legislator drafts rules for a newer kind of job loss that's mostly still ahead. Both pressures point at the same vulnerability: a regional economy leaning hard on one sector. At an October panel on the IE economy, speakers warned the region had put "all its eggs in one basket" and cited a figure — sourced to the City of Riverside's economic development office — that 60% of logistics jobs could be automated by 2035. IEGO's Matthew Mena noted the region has already lost more than 6,000 logistics jobs, and that seasonal hiring headlines mask the trend because the jobs vanish each January.
Whether SB 951 becomes law is unsettled — Gov. Newsom signed an executive order in May directing state agencies to study AI's workforce impact, which could give the Legislature cause to wait on Reyes's bill. But the bill's premise lands locally regardless: the IE built its labor market on a sector facing both a cyclical squeeze now and an automation question later, and the people who represent it are starting to legislate for the second problem before the first has let up.