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Wednesday, June 26, 2024

Does UCLA Have a Plan?

In response to a particular workplace incident, California enacted a law last September which goes into effect July 1 requiring most employers to have a plan in place to prevent or deal with workplace violence events. There appear to be separate regulations applicable to the hospital, but it appears that the rest of UCLA is covered by the new law. There are supposed to be training programs for employees as part of the legislation. From the LA Business Journal

...Under SB 553, nearly every employer in the state is required to draw up a detailed plan to prevent workplace violence incidents and implement a system to respond to any such incidents that do occur. The law exempts major health care establishments that have had to comply with a similar law on the books for several decades; it also exempts law enforcement and prison agencies. Employers who never have 10 or more employees on their premises are also exempt.

Besides the plans, the law also requires annual training sessions for all employees on the steps they need to take to reduce the risk of – or respond to – workplace violence incidents. Failure to have a plan in place by July 1 subjects the employer to fines from state regulators when they go out to inspect workplaces for health and safety violations.

But the details about what is supposed to go into these plans are vague – in part because it depends on input from employees. The same goes for the training sessions...

Full story at https://labusinessjournal.com/featured/employers-scramble-to-meet-state-deadline-for-violence-prevention-plan/.

Yours truly looked at SB 553 and found no indication that public employers such as UCLA (or the other UC campuses) were exempt.*

UCLA does have an online training program for active shooter incidents. See below:

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrbqmzCZS_A.

However, the new requirement refers to workplace violence more generally, not necessarily a shooting event such as depicted in the training video above. We are getting close to July 1, and it's not clear how the new requirements will be met.

Also unclear is how the new law applies in the event of protests and confrontations on campus that produce incidents of violence. The entire UCLA campus is a place of employment, a workplace. Whatever plans the UCLA administration has for dealing which such events have not been incorporated into training programs for employees nor have they been made public. 

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*https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB553.

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