SB 294 Workplace Know Your Rights Act: Employer Obligations

What the annual notice must cover

• The right to notice of an I-9 inspection by immigration authorities.
• Protection against unfair immigration-related practices.
• Constitutional rights when interacting with law enforcement in the workplace.
• The right to organize and to engage in protected concerted activity.
• Protection from retaliation for exercising workplace rights.
• How to contact the Labor Commissioner's Office.

The emergency contact piece

Employees may designate an emergency contact to be notified if the employee is arrested or detained at work. Employers need a process for collecting that designation, storing it confidentially, keeping it current, and actually using it — which means someone must own the task before the situation arises, not during it.

Implementation steps

• Use the Labor Commissioner's template notice, which is published in multiple languages and updated annually.
• Distribute to all employees, in the language you use to communicate employment information to them.
• Add the notice to onboarding so new hires receive it on day one rather than waiting for the annual cycle.
• Document delivery — dated acknowledgments or auditable HRIS records are what defend an inquiry.
• Set a recurring January calendar item so the annual redistribution never depends on memory.

Where employers get tripped up

The failures we see are administrative, not philosophical: notices sent to corporate email addresses that field employees never check, Spanish-speaking crews handed English-only versions, and no record proving distribution happened. Each is easy to fix in advance and expensive to explain afterward.