How Do You Determine Who Must Take the 2 Hour SB1343 Supervisors’ Training From Those Who Can Just Take the 1 Hour Course?
California SB 1343 requires California employers with five or more employees to provide sexual harassment prevention training every two years. This new law changed from prior law as now both supervisors and non-supervisors must receive training. SB 1343 requires the supervisor course to be two hours long, but non-supervisors must only train for one hour. Yet, few upper-level employees have “Supervisor” in their job title. How do you determine which employees need to take which course?
Who is a Supervisor under California FEHA?
The California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) considers an employee a supervisor if they have the discretion and authority to:
hire, transfer, promote, assign, reward, discipline, or discharge other employees, or effectively recommend any of these actions; or
act on the grievances of other employees or effectively recommend action on grievances; or
direct employee(s)’ daily work activities.
This is very broad language. As a result, many employees will qualify as a supervisor for the purpose of the statute even if their job title doesn’t contain the word.
To ensure that everyone who needs to take the supervisor course is correctly trained the first time, consider your employees’ discretion and authority.
What Happens When a Supervisor Takes the Wrong Course?
Let’s say a mistake happens and a supervisor takes the one hour non-supervisory employee course. Could they repeat the same course and use that to qualify for a total of two hours of training?
The short answer is: “Probably, No“.
Unfortunately, the law requires content for supervisors that California Required Training Solutions cannot fit into the one-hour course. Thus the employee who took a non-supervisor course twice wouldn’t get that required content. The employee would have to retrain for another two hours in the supervisors’ course, even though some of the material would be very familiar.
At California Required Training Solutions, we don’t want anyone to repeat training.
If you should find that you have purchased non-supervisory courses where you needed supervisor ones, please try to flag your folks before they start training, and then shoot us an email on registrar@calreq.com so we can get those units upgraded.
