Orange County Employment Lawyers Blog
As of this month, all state departments in California are required to track all claims of sexual harassment. Now, they will be able to do so using a single streamlined system managed by the California Department of Human Resources.
The system was proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018 following an investigation by The Sacramento Bee revealing the state spent $25 million over the course of three years to settle sexual harassment lawsuits against state employees. In many cases, offenders kept their jobs, despite repeated complaints and even as victims were forced to resign and be subject to no rehire clauses if they settled their civil cases. (No rehire clauses are now outlawed thanks to the passage of AB 749 last fall.)
The data tracker went live on Jan. 1, 2020 and cost $1.5 million to launch. Before this, the state had no uniform way of tracking allegations of sexual harassment across its 150+ departments. Continue Reading ›