By Elizabeth A. French, Esq.
This article first appeared in the CAI San Diego Community Insider Magazine, Spring 2025 Issue
In California the law recognizes an employee’s right to enjoyment of a safe and healthy workplace in discharging day to day duties at work. California has recently enacted some new laws to ensure that employers are proactively protecting their employees. What is workplace violence? It is defined as any act of violence or threat of violence that occurs in a place of employment. The law breaks the violence down into four categories. The first is criminal intent – a person approaches the workplace with the intent to commit crime like retail robberies or threats to security guards. The second category is violence directed at employees by customers, clients, patients, students or visitors. The third type is violence against an employee by a present or former employee, supervisor or manager. The fourth is violence committed by a person who does not work there but has a personal relationship with an employee.
Beginning July 1, 2024, California employers were required to develop and adopt a written workplace violence prevention plan, train employees and supervisors on workplace violence matters, create and maintain violence incidence logs, and retain records of all associated training. This law applies to most public and private employers in California including qualifying common interest developments. However, there are exemptions. Smaller employers with less than ten employees present at the same time are exempt, but those employers must have a compliant injury and illness prevention plan. Telecommuting employees that work from a location of their choice are exempt. Certain healthcare facilities and law enforcement agencies are also exempt.
Failure to comply with this new law could result in a misdemeanor violation pursuant to Labor Code Section 6401.9(g). This article is not intended to comprehensively cover all of the requirements, rather it is intended to simply apprise employers of their obligations and provide an overview. Employers can find in depth information about the new law’s requirements at California’s Department of Industrial Relations, www.dir.ca.gov. A number of other websites have popped up with legally compliant programs designed to assist employers with implementing the new law with forms and training programs.
In order to comply with the new law, employers need to make a written Workplace Violence Prevention Plan (WVPP) that is easily accessible to all employees.
In general, the WVPP must identify who is responsible for implementing the plan and have effective procedures for doing so. Employers should involve employees and their authorized representatives in developing the plan. The plan must require employers to respond to reports of workplace violence, prohibit retaliation against employees reporting acts of violence, ensure supervisors and non-supervisors comply with the plan, provide for communication about violence incidents, and outline the investigative procedure that will be used. It must further provide for training, procedures for identifying hazards, and procedures for timely correction, post-incident response and investigation and finally, the effectiveness of the plan must be evaluated and revised as warranted.
Next, employers are also required to train employees when the plan is implemented, and then annually thereafter. The training must cover the WVPP and inform employees about how to obtain copies of it, inform employees how to report violent incidents, identify hazards that are specific to each employee’s work environment, identify corrective measures, advise how to seek assistance to prevent or respond to violence while avoiding physical harm, and finally inform the employees about the log and how to get copies of the log.
Employers must record all incidents of violence in detail (who, what, where, when, and why) but without personal identifying information of the person providing the information for a log. Further, the classification of the circumstances and location of the incident must be included, the type of violence, consequence of the incident (was law enforcement called?), the name as well as job title of the person making the log entry and the date the entry was completed. Finally, all associated records (log and training records) must be maintained and made available to employees upon request within fifteen days.
There is also a new law that went into effect on January 1, 2025, that makes it easier for employers to obtain a workplace restraining order on behalf of their employees. This law applies to all common interest developments with employees.
The previous law allowed California employers to seek restraining orders on behalf of employees and their families where there was workplace violence or credible threats of violence. The new law expands this protection to now allow employers to seek protection orders for employees who have been harassed. The new law defines harassment as knowing and willful conduct that seriously alarms, annoys or harasses a specific person that serves no legitimate purpose and would cause a reasonable person to suffer substantial emotional distress and must actually cause substantial emotional distress. The legislature does not want employers to have to wait until things escalate into violence before allowing the employer to seek an order of protection. As such, these changes permit an employer to act sooner than they could under prior law.
So, the good news is California is expanding protections for employees so that everyone feels safe and healthy in their places of work. However, at the same time employers need to be aware of these changes and ensure compliance as well as the ability to take advantage of these enhanced worker protections.
Elizabeth A. French, Esq. is a partner at Green, Bryant and French, LLP and can be reached at efrench@gbflawyers.com.