A.B. 2321 Widens Cal/OSHA Criminal Referral Triggers for Employers

A.B. 2321 Widens Cal/OSHA Criminal Referral Triggers for Employers

A.B. 2321, signed Sept. 30 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, changes when Cal/OSHA must investigate workplace incidents and alert prosecutors, per Safety+Health magazine.

What the Law Changes

The law directs the Cal/OSHA Bureau of Investigations (BOI) to look into incidents involving a serious injury, illness or exposure for which the division issues a citation for a willful violation. Separately, Cal/OSHA must “immediately notify the appropriate prosecuting authority” in three situations:

• A workplace death
• A serious injury, illness or exposure affecting five or more employees
• A request for prosecution from a division representative

The law also requires BOI to set written policies and procedures for reviewing cases and deciding whether to investigate or refer them for prosecution. Safety+Health’s coverage does not give an effective date for the law or say when those policies are due.

Assemblymember Liz Ortega (D-San Leandro), the bill’s sponsor, pushed the change after an August 2025 hearing. She described an employer in her district with three worker deaths in eight years. According to her office’s press release, that employer had paid $18,000 in fines as of the hearing. “I want to see actual accountability,” Ortega said at the hearing.

What It Means for Subcontractors

• Confirm the effective date first. The source does not state one. Read the chaptered text of A.B. 2321 or ask counsel before you rewrite procedures, so you know which incidents the new rules cover.
• Treat every fatality as a prosecutor-notification event. Under the law, Cal/OSHA must notify prosecutors immediately after a workplace death once it takes effect. Your incident-response plan should name one point of contact for investigators. It should also call for preserving the scene and records, and for looping in counsel the same day. (The steps are our inference, not from the source.)
• Check your multi-worker exposure scenarios. The five-or-more-employees trigger covers serious injury, illness or exposure. A single event on a large crew, such as a gas release or heat illness cluster, could plausibly reach that number. This is our inference, not something the source says.
• Audit your paper trail against willful-violation risk. A willful citation tied to a serious injury, illness or exposure sends the case to BOI. Pull your training records, hazard assessments and corrective-action logs for California jobs. Make sure they show what you knew and what you did about it.
• Ask your broker and carrier in writing about criminal-referral exposure. Request how your policies treat defense costs for a criminal investigation or referral arising from a worksite incident. The source says nothing about insurance, so this is a risk-management step based on our reading of the law. Do it before renewal, not after an incident.
• Watch for BOI’s written referral policies. The law requires them, but the source gives no publication date. Ask your counsel or trade association to flag when they appear, since they will show how cases get screened.