Corporate Relocation
San Diego

The Household Movers Act sits at Business and Professions Code division 8, chapter 3.1, and §19225.5 says a household mover “includes every corporation or person” transporting used household goods and personal effects for compensation over any public highway in the state. Office furniture is not household goods, so the Act addresses it in its own sentence: a household mover, under its permit, “may also transport used office, store, and institution furniture and fixtures.” Desks, casegoods, file cabinets and fixtures, in other words. The Bureau’s licensee FAQs say the same thing from the other side, that a mover may carry office, store and institution furniture under a household movers permit instead of a motor carrier permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Act ties that to an election by the mover, and a mover that revokes the election comes under the Motor Carriers of Property Permit Act for the same furniture.

Now the limit, which sits in the very same provision: the bureau “shall not regulate the service, routes, or prices charged for the transportation of used office, store, and institution furniture and fixtures by a household mover.” So the consumer rate protections that govern a household move, the maximum rate tariff and the ceilings that come with it, do not follow the permit onto your floor. On a corporate move the written scope and the written price are what do that job instead. That is not a loophole, it is the reason this page spends its length on the phase plan, the labeling scheme and one point of contact rather than on a rate card.

The line runs the other way too. A business that performs office moves only is not a household mover at all, and the Bureau is explicit that such a carrier must be permitted by the Department of Motor Vehicles rather than by the Bureau. So “which authority do you hold” is a fair question to put to every bidder on your floor, and whatever they answer is checkable against the Bureau’s license lookup.

8 CCR §3220 requires the plan to cover emergency evacuation procedures “including type of evacuation and exit route assignments.” The written plan “shall be kept at the workplace and made available for employee review,” and an employer with 10 or fewer employees may communicate it orally instead of keeping a written one. Before the plan is put into effect, the employer has to designate and train enough people to assist a safe and orderly evacuation. And the section requires the employer to “review with each employee upon initial assignment those parts of the plan which the employee must know to protect the employee in the event of an emergency.”

Exit route assignments are written against a particular layout, so a facilities lead normally rewrites them for the new floor rather than carrying the old ones across. The fire prevention plan at §3221 works the same way: kept in the workplace, reviewed with each employee on the parts they need. None of that is our work and none of it sits on the critical path of the move. It belongs on the list of things that quietly has to be true by the Monday your staff sit down, which is exactly why the phase plan gets written down and shared rather than held in one person’s head.