1.4.23
By Molly Wood, SPHR, MAOL Senior HR Consultant 
It’s January. Time to take down the tinsel, start a fresh fitness routine, and brace yourself for more employment laws. While there have been several additions and revisions, the more cumbersome mandates include pay transparency and bereavement leave.
Employers with 15 or more employees must include a pay range in all job postings and provide employees with the pay range for their position upon request. That means that if you don’t currently have established pay ranges, you’d better develop some quick! Additionally, employers with 100 or more employees will need to expand their compensation reports to include the median and mean hourly rate within each job category for each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex. SDEA will be doing a second session of our “Creating a Transparent Comp Plan” webinar on January 12 from 12:30 – 1:30. We anticipate that the trend to be more forthright in pay practices will be ongoing, especially in California.
Effective January 1, 2023, bereavement leave of at least five days is now required and job protected. There are limits on who is considered a family member (although at SDEA we don’t recommend being that stringent) and the leave does not need to be paid. You can also require that the leave be taken within three months of the family member’s passing.
Other updates include an amendment to the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) that provides employee protections to care for a “designated person”, a new law that prohibits retaliation if an employee refuses to report to work or leaves work due to an “emergency condition”, an extension on the statute of limitations for sexual assault claims, and multi-lingual Cal/OSHA posting requirements.
All these new laws will be discussed in detail at SDEA’s live Employment Law Update on January 26 from 8:30 – 12:30, along with predictions of legislation we can expect to see in 2024 (Teaser – off duty marijuana usage will be a protected category). Here is a link with details on the event and how to register.
SDEA members have access to unlimited HR advice. Nothing is too big or small, so don’t hesitate to call. 858-505-0024