CA Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Laws and Requirements

 A guide to California laws requiring sexual harassment prevention training laws and requirements.

Learn about the newest workplace harassment training regulations, deadlines and requirements.

Over the last few years, laws and regulations have drastically changed impacting California employers’ responsibilities to train all employees on sexual harassment and all forms of discriminatory harassment.

Our courses are designed for employers who need harassment training in California.

Employee Harassment Prevention Training in English and Spanish

Supervisor Sexual Harassment Training in English and Spanish

CA  Laws and Training Requirements:

AB 1825

Assembly Bill 1825 (AB 1825) and Government Code section 12950.1 outline the requirements for harassment compliance training. AB 1825 requires California businesses with 50 or more employees to train their supervisors on sexual harassment, every two years.

AB 1825 applies only to employers with fifty or more employees or contractors. The 50-employee count includes full time, part time, and temporary employees. But be aware, AB 1825 defines an employer as “any person engaged in any business or enterprise in California, who employs 50 or more employees to perform services for a wage or salary or contractors or any person acting as an agent of an employer, directly or indirectly.” This means if your business has employees in other states, which bring your total employee count to fifty or above, training would be required.

SB 1343

Effective January, 2019 Gov. Code 12950.1 (Amended by SB 1343) requires all California employers with 5 or more employees provide 1 hour of sexual harassment and abusive conduct prevention training to non-managerial employees and 2 hours of sexual harassment and abusive conduct prevention training to managerial employees once every two years.
The training and education required by SB 1343 must include:

• • Information and practical guidance regarding both federal and state guidelines for the prohibition, prevention and the correction of sexual harassment
  • Remedies available to victims of sexual harassment
  • Practical examples aimed at instructing supervisors in the prevention of:
    • Harassment,
    • discrimination,
    • retaliation,
    • harassment based on gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation

The law also requires training be provided by trainers or educators with knowledge and expertise in those areas.
California Department of Employment and Housing (DFEH) requires both managerial and non-managerial employees must receive training by January 1, 2020.

BE AWARE: California employees statewide must be retrained by January 1, 2022. Check your training date documentation to stay on track with the requirements.

AB 2053

Assembly Bill 2053 requires California employees include workplace abusive conduct training (anti -bullying training) into the already required AB 1825 training program to address abusive conduct. (This requirement began January 1, 2015.)

“Abusive conduct” is defined as “with malice, which a reasonable person would find hostile, offensive, and unrelated to an employer’s legitimate business interests…such as repeated infliction of verbal abuse, such as the use of derogatory remarks, insults, and epithets, verbal or physical conduct that a reasonable person would find threatening, intimidating, or humiliating, or the gratuitous sabotage or undermining of a person’s work performance.”
Abusive conduct / workplace bullying is included in all of our sexual harassment training and meets the AB 2053 training requirement.

FEHA

The California Department of Fair Employment to the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), Requirements were placed into effect 2016:

Under this law, CA employers with five or more employees are required to:

• • Take “reasonable” steps to prevent and correct discrimination and harassment.
  • Employers must create detailed written policies for preventing harassment, discrimination, and retaliation.
  • Employers must distribute its prevention policies to all current and future employees. If 10 percent or more of the workers in a given location speak a language other than English, an employer must also translate its policies into those alternative languages.
  • Policy must protect issues related to:
    • Gender expression” means a person’s gender-related appearance or behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s sex at birth.
    • “Gender identity” means a person’s identification as male, female, a gender different from the person’s sex at birth, or transgender.
    • “Sex Stereotype” means an assumption about a person’s appearance or behavior, or about an individual’s ability or inability to perform certain kinds of work based on myth,
  • Supervisors must report any harassment that they observe or know of, even if no one is objecting to the harassment.

SB 396

Senate Bill 396 became law in 2017 and is now part of the Fair Employment & Housing Act (FEHA) and requires gender identity training requires California employers with 50 or more employees to provide harassment training that must now also include harassment based on gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.

And requires two hours of training for all supervisory employees within six months of their hire date and must be repeated every two years.

SB 1087

Senate Bill 1087 (is a California Law for Farm Workers. Senate Bill 1087 makes farms a safer place for women by creating training requirements and guidelines. The law imposes penalties on Farm Labor Contractors (FLC) who fail to comply. It prohibits the California Labor Commissioner from issuing new or renewal an FLC license to anyone who has been found by a court or an administrative agency to have committed sexual harassment of an employee within the past three years.