Sexual Harassment Training: Sexual Harassment Classes - Who Needs Them?

One of the more misunderstood aspects of California's Sexual Harassment Training Law (AB-1825) is who exactly it applies to when a company has operations outside of California. For a company whose business is entirely California-based, the law is pretty clear. If it has 50 or more employees (or subcontractors), then it must provide sexual harassment training all supervisory employees.

But what if most of the company's operations are located outside California? What if, for example, you have over 50 employees outside California, and a small number of employees inside California? Do you still need to provide sexual harassment training for your supervisors? If so, which ones? All of your supervisors? Or just the ones supervising California employees?

The AB-1825 law is pretty vague in this respect. Here's the relevant portion of the law:

For purposes of this section only, "employer" means any person regularly employing 50 or more persons or regularly receiving the services of 50 or more persons providing services pursuant to a contract, or any person acting as an agent of an employer, directly or indirectly, the state, or any political or civil subdivision of the state, and cities.

One of SexualHarassmentClass.com's clients had just such a problem. This company was located in Denver and had a few hundred employees there. It also had several outside sales people based in California. They wanted to know who should be trained, if anybody?

Our opinion was that since there is no clear case law or legal precedent in this area, the best move was to be conservative as possible. Since the company had employees located in California and it was complying with California regulations (minimum wage law, having California withholding, etc), it's a safe bet that this company fell within AB-1825 regulations. Nowhere in the law does it say that the supervisors or the 50 employee limit was for California employees, which further reinforces that this company needed to comply with the law.

Remember, it's a employer law. Not a law for individual supervisors. The company must be in compliance.

So our opinion is that at a minimum, all supervisors who supervised the California employees should receive AB-1825 compliant sexual harassment training.

What about the rest of the supervisors? Those who didn't work in California and didn't supervise California employees? One might argue that these people shouldn't be trained. But again, it's a California employer requirement. Nowhere does the law limit itself to train California supervisors or supervisors of California employees.

So again, trying to be conservative, our recommendation was to have all the company's supervisors trained. This would guarantee meeting California's AB-1825 requirements under all possible circumstances for the relatively small cost of the online sexual harassment class training.

Plus, most importantly, all that training will pay off in the long run by reducing the company's likelihood of sexual harassment problems in the future.

Source: Ari Novick, PhD link