Weary from spending the last two years focusing on pandemic-driven legislative agendas, state and federal lawmakers started the new year focused on the upcoming elections and a return to “normal” legislative issues. However, the first half of the year was defined by a legislative effort aimed at one of the most important segments of the industry: health care staffing. Nurse staffing agencies, which months earlier were being lauded as playing an integral part in fighting the pandemic, found themselves the subject of proposed restrictive legislation.

But it wasn’t just nurse staffing that was the target of state and federal legislatures. Bills and initiatives dealing with employers’ use of artificial intelligence, pay disclosure, predictive scheduling, and other issues made the beginning of 2022 particularly busy for the staffing industry in state houses across the country.

Through it all, ASA secured major legislative victories in an effort to ensure that its members could remain unencumbered in placing people in jobs.