Two things happened this summer that belong together, though nobody seems to have set them side by side.
On 1 July the California Civil Rights Department published a form titled Survivors of Violence and Family Members of Victims Right to Leave and Accommodations. Employers are required to give it to their employees. Seven weeks later, on 21 August, the California Supreme Court held in Iloff v. LaPaille that an employer hoping to avoid liquidated damages on an unpaid wage claim must show it actually tried to find out what the law required of it.
Read together, the message is not subtle. California is increasingly willing to regulate what you tell your employees, and increasingly unwilling to hear that you did not know you were supposed to tell them.
What AB 2499 changed, and why the relocation matters
Since 1 January 2025, California’s leave and accommodation protections for victims of violence have lived in the Fair Employment and Housing Act at Government Code section 12945.8. They used to sit in the Labor Code. That move sounds like housekeeping. It is not.
Enforcement now belongs to the Civil Rights Department rather than the Labor Commissioner, which means the claim arrives with the procedures, the investigative posture, and the remedial architecture of a discrimination statute rather than a wage statute. It also means the obligation is framed as an accommodation duty, and accommodation duties are interactive. They are not discharged by a policy sitting in a handbook.
The statute operates in two tiers.
- Every employer, with no size threshold. You may not discharge or discriminate against an employee for taking time off to serve on a jury, to appear in court as a witness, or to obtain relief including a restraining order. And you owe reasonable accommodation for the safety of an employee who is, or whose family member is, a victim of a qualifying act of violence.
- Twenty-five or more employees. Add unpaid leave for the enumerated purposes: seeking medical attention, obtaining services from a shelter or victim services organisation, counselling, safety planning and relocation, participating in legal proceedings, and caring for a family member who is a victim.
The trigger, a “qualifying act of violence,” is defined broadly. It reaches domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking, and it also reaches conduct causing bodily injury or death, conduct involving a firearm or other dangerous weapon, and a threat of force. An employer reading that definition narrowly is reading it wrong.
The notice, and the four moments it comes due
Section 12945.8 directed the Department to publish a form on or before 1 July 2025, and the Department did. What most employers have not registered is that publication of the form starts the employer’s clock, not the Department’s. The notice is owed at four separate moments:
| When | What that means operationally |
|---|---|
| On hire | Add it to the new-hire packet. This one takes care of itself once the packet is right. |
| Annually | Pick a date and hold it. Open enrolment and the start of the calendar year are the two dates people actually remember. |
| On request | Whoever answers HR questions needs to have the form to hand, not know where to look for it. |
| On disclosure | When an employee tells you that they, or a family member, are a victim. |
The fourth is the one that gets missed, and it is the one most likely to be litigated. It is not triggered by a calendar. It is triggered by a conversation, usually a difficult one, often held with a supervisor who has no idea a legal obligation just attached to what they were told. An employee mentions a restraining order, or explains why they need Thursday morning, and a duty arises in that moment.
This is a training problem before it is a paperwork problem. The form is easy. Getting a shift supervisor to recognise the disclosure, hand over the form, say nothing else, and route it to one named person is the part that requires actual work.
What the Supreme Court said in August
Labor Code section 1194.2 allows an employer to escape liquidated damages on a minimum wage claim if it can show it acted in good faith and had reasonable grounds to believe it was complying. Employers have long treated that as a sincerity test. In Iloff v. LaPaille, decided 21 August 2025, the California Supreme Court held that it is not. To reach the defence an employer must show that it made an attempt, reasonable in the circumstances, to determine what the law required.
Not that it meant well. Not that it had never been told. That it looked.
That holding is about wages, and we are not going to stretch it into a general rule it does not state. But it says something about the direction of travel that any California employer should hear. The defence of having been unaware is being narrowed, deliberately, at the same time as the number of things you are required to affirmatively communicate keeps growing.
Build the calendar, not the memo
The instinct when a new notice lands is to send it once and move on. That is how employers end up with a drawer full of correct documents and no evidence that anyone received them.
The better response is structural. Take every recurring communication obligation you carry, put it in one table, and give each row four columns: what goes out, who receives it, when, and how you will prove it went. Most employers of twenty-five to five hundred discover, when they do this, that they are carrying six or eight recurring obligations and tracking none of them. The survivors-of-violence notice is simply the newest.
While you have the table open, check one more row. Labor Code section 6401.9 has required a written workplace violence prevention plan since 1 July 2024, with initial training and training annually thereafter, and a violent incident log kept for a minimum of five years. Employers with fewer than ten employees present at any given time at a site not accessible to the public are outside it, as are certain health care facilities and employees teleworking from a location of their own choosing. Everyone else is inside it, including a great many employers who assumed the law was written for hospitals.
Two adjacent obligations, both concerning violence, both requiring you to tell employees something and prove you did. They should be on the same page of the same calendar. In most organisations we look at, they are on no page at all.
Three things worth doing this month
- Distribute the Civil Rights Department form to every current employee, and record the date and method. A dated email to the whole staff is a perfectly good record. No record at all is not.
- Put the form in the new-hire packet, and fix the packet rather than fixing the next hire.
- Tell your supervisors what a disclosure sounds like and what to do in the ninety seconds after they hear one. That is a twenty-minute conversation, and it is worth more than the handbook language it replaces.
Sources
- California Civil Rights Department, calcivilrights.ca.gov, for the survivors-of-violence notice and accompanying frequently asked questions.
- Government Code section 12945.8.
- Iloff v. LaPaille, S275848 (Cal. 21 August 2025).
- Cal/OSHA, workplace violence prevention in general industry, dir.ca.gov.
This describes general California employment requirements. It is not legal advice about your organisation, and it does not account for a collective bargaining agreement, an industry-specific order, or a local ordinance that may change the answer.