AB 2537: Paid volunteer = oxymoron

Every year, hundreds of environmental and other nonprofit organizations provide volunteer workers to help build parks and trails, clear streams and do other related work to protect California’s natural environment. State law, however, requires that all public works projects pay prevailing wage. That law drifts into the nonsensical when it is interpreted to apply to volunteers. AB 2537 (Furutani) allows nonprofits and their volunteers to continue working on environmental protection projects by extending until 2012 the existing exemption for specified volunteers on public works projects from the state’s prevailing wage requirement.