California Workplace & Employment Law Blog

On December 30, 2019, a federal district court granted a temporary restraining order requested by several business groups, to prevent AB 51, which banned mandatory arbitration agreements in California, from taking effect.

On September 18, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB-5, sweeping legislation that will affect the proper employment classification of over a million California workers who currently work as independent contractors. AB-5 codifies and expands the California Supreme Court’s decision in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles, 4 Cal.5th 903 (2018), which adopted the “ABC test” in holding that a company classifying an individual as an independent contractor bears the burden of justifying that individual’s independent contractor classification.

California employers have six months left to comply with a new law that took effect on January 1, 2019, which requires virtually all California employers to provide sexual harassment prevention training to all employees. Specifically, by January 1, 2020, employers with five or more employees must provide one hour of sexual harassment prevention training to nonsupervisory employees and two hours of such training to supervisors.