In 2018, the California Legislature approved a series of bills meant to further prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. This training is meant to provide up-to-date information and practical guidance examples regarding the prevention and correction of behaviors that could be considered sexual harassment while also offering remedies available to victims of sexual harassment in employment.
This bill expanded employee protective regulations to require businesses that employ five or more employees, including temporary or seasonal employees, to provide at least two hours of sexual harassment prevention training. These regulations update mandates that only applied to employers with at least 50 employees. In addition, they now dictate that training hours are to be distributed in at least 1 hour of training to all supervisory employees and at least 1 hour of sexual harassment prevention training to all nonsupervisory employees.
Permanent employees within an organization are expected to complete this new training either individually or as part of group presentations. This means that temporary agencies are responsible for providing prevention training to their employees (which is expected to take place within 30 calendar days after the hire date or within 100 hours worked). Additionally, these new bills make it so employers are not concerned with training independent contractors, volunteers, and unpaid interns.
This new training might be done in a single session or may be completed in shorter segments, as long as the total hourly requirement is met. To ensure compliance with these new practices, authorities will issue mandatory supervision to employers across the state. As part of the supervision process, employers are expected to keep attendance records from training sessions in case the company ever needs to prove compliance.
The initial deadline to start providing new training to all required employees was originally set to January 1, 2020. However, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing has granted both a deadline extension to January 2021. In addition to this extension, the DFEH developed a series of 1-hour and 2-hour online training courses for this purpose available in several languages.