SB 428 Allows Employers to Seek Restraining Orders to Protect Employees Facing Harassment

Under existing law, California employers may seek a restraining order when one or more of their employees have suffered unlawful violence or a credible threat of violence connected to the workplace. Now, Senate Bill 428 (“SB 428”) enables employers to seek harassment-related restraining orders as well.

Beginning January 1, 2025, an employer whose employee suffers harassment—defined under the law as “a knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously alarms, annoys, or harasses the person, and that serves no legitimate purpose”—may seek a temporary restraining order and/or injunction to prevent further harassment. Individual employees also have the ability to seek restraining orders against harassment.

SB 428 specifically prohibits courts from issuing injunctions that interfere with speech protected by the Constitution, the National Labor Relations Act, or the laws protecting the labor rights of public sector employees.

Restraining orders are an important protection for individuals who face harassment or violence. SB 428 will help unions in their capacity as employers when their employees face harassment. Restraining orders have also occasionally been misused by employers as an improper means to stifle union activity, so this bill may also mean unions will have to look out for and defend against more illegitimate efforts to prevent their members from exercising their labor rights at work. Unions can also demand to bargain over the impacts on bargaining-unit employees of an employer attempting to seek a restraining order pursuant to this new law.

If you have any questions, please contact your labor law counsel.