New year will ring in new employment laws: here's how you can make sure you're in compliance.

• Author: Terman, Mark E.

Perhaps buoyed by a growing statewide sensibility that a stronger economy will be built in part by retaining and attracting new employers to California, 2004 has brought some relief to employers in the form of a lower volume of major employment legislation and a partial rollback of 2003 legislation that was onerous to employers. While it too early to tell whether this year's workers' compensation reform (SB 899) will produce the kind of relief promised, here are other new employment laws that you need to know about for 2005.

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MANDATORY ANTI-HARASSMENT TRAINING FOR SUPERVISORS (AB 1825)

Employers with 50 or more workers must provide at least two hours of interactive anti-harassment training and education to all supervisors. The program must provide information and guidance about federal and state laws that prohibit sexual harassment; procedures and methods to prevent and correct sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation; and the remedies available to victims of sexual harassment.

Trainers or educators, who are experts in the prevention of harassment, discrimination and retaliation, must present the training and include practical examples in their instruction. This suggests that most training will be done by human resource professionals or lawyers brought in from outside since many in-house personnel do not have high expertise with these issues.

Under this law, "employer" includes any person regularly employing 50 or more people, regularly receiving the services of 50 or more people pursuant to a contract, or any person acting as an agent of an employer, directly or indirectly. As such, AB 1825 counts independent contractors and temporary workers in determining a business' employee count.

The training must be completed by Jan. 1, 2006, and the training must be repeated every two years. Employers can count compliant training that occurred since Jan. 1, 2003. Since new supervisors must complete the training within six months of their new duties, some employers may require a training program every six months.

Employers should be planning their training now. While compliant training will not insulate an employer from liability for sexual harassment, it should have the practical effect of reducing misconduct in the first instance and it will be used by counsel, in tandem with recent California Supreme Court precedent, to defend against claims of employees who failed to complain about sexual harassment early so they...