We are high school students currently enrolled in the California Fremont Unified School District. In December 2021, we were both extremely excited to receive a job offer from a company founded by a well known college math professor. The job opportunity would allow us to learn and help make gifted education scalable to students worldwide through an innovative online platform that is powered by advanced AI. 

Unfortunately, it was a big shock to us when our work permit applications were rejected by our school because it turns out that in California, minors are prohibited from acquiring any paid remote job opportunities. According to the existing California Law Code 49163, work permits for minors can only be issued for jobs conducted in a physical brick-and-mortar business place where the state agency and school officials may conduct health and safety inspections in order to ensure that the minor is not being negatively affected by the employment. But the company that we received the job offer conducts its business completely online, and the TAs are recruited across various states based on their qualifications rather than their location. Therefore, it’s impossible for the company to open a physical branch office near all the TAs. It will not scale that way - which in fact is the key for many online businesses to be successful, especially during pandemics. So in the end, we could not take on the job offer because of this law restriction, which is quite disappointing.

With the growing relevance around the online sphere and advancement in online technology, many exciting real industry learning opportunities have been arising through jobs completely conducted online in a remote fashion. In our opinion, California Education code 49163 is outdated and should be reformed so that minors can legally participate in such potential learning opportunities. In fact, students in many other states do not face such restrictions. We have recently voiced this issue with our district assembly member who is quite supportive of fixing the issue and with his encouragement, we have submitted the bill proposal to the California state legislature.  But this is just the beginning for making the ultimate change we want; we need the key support from our community so that with all of our voices together, we can prompt the California state legislature to prioritize the fix of this issue. Please sign this petition to voice your support on allowing California’s young generation to gain potential exciting learning opportunities through online remote jobs.

Update: Huge thanks to Assemblymember Alex Lee for helping us introduce this as a bill in the California Assembly! It is officially listed in his 2023-2024 legislative session (Bill AB 640): https://a24.asmdc.org/2023-legislation If possible, we'd really appreciate it if you could contact your local Assemblymembers and ask them to support this bill!

Update 2: On March 22, we went to the State Capitol to testify on behalf of this bill in a committee review session (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TQwpc1T5d0&feature=youtu.be). We're happy to announce that we received a unanimous aye vote from all the committee members present! There is still another committee review session that the bill needs to go through, and then a final floor vote before it becomes law, so please continue to support and share with others!

Thanks for your support!

Emma Li and Brian Li (Mission San Jose High School)