Please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands modern under God invisible with liberty and justice for all.

Madam Clerk, would you please take a role?

Council Member Aguilar.

Present.

Councilmember Azevedo.

Present.

Councilmember Bolt.

Present.

Council Member Simon.

Present.

Vice Mayor Bavaros Walton.

Present.

Councilmember Bowen.

Present and Mayor Gonzalez.

Present.

And or the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.

California Penal Code Sections 403 or 415 are per se disruptive to a meeting and will not be tolerated.

Please see the City Council handbook and City Council meeting rules of decorum for more information.

Madam Clerk, your announcement, please.

If you would like to make a public comment regarding the special meeting agenda item, you can do so in person or via Zoom.

If you are present at the meeting, please complete a speaker card and submit it to the city clerk before the item is presented.

If you wish to participate in public comment via Zoom, please raise your hand when the item is called.

Okay, before jumping into our full training, which is our one item for this special meeting, uh, just checking to see if we've got any public commenters on the training that we are about to receive.

Mayor, we have not received any cards and there are no hands raised online.

Okay, so we will close public comment on this item and then proceed with our presentation.

I know city attorney, I think you are introducing this item.

Yes, thank you, Mayor.

And good evening, uh, City Council.

I'd like to it's my pleasure to introduce Neha Shah.

She's a she's a senior of counsel at Redwood Public Law.

She has significant experience in a broad range of labor and employment matters with an emphasis on traditional labor relations, advice and counsel, and workplace investigations.

She's a frequent presenter and trainer and regularly speaks at conferences and seminars on public sector labor law, practices before PERB, harassment prevention, equity and inclusion, and human resources best practices.

I'll hand it over to Naha to commence with the uh training.

Thank you.

Thank you for the introduction, Rich, and nice to meet all of you.

Uh so today's training is being rendered in accordance with the California government code, uh 12950.

Um, as Rich uh shared my background, I want to provide a little bit more context.

Um, I started my career as a workplace investigator doing uh discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and Title IX investigations.

And since then, uh the focus of my practice has been um processing, discrimination, harassment, retaliation claims, both in civil proceedings, EEOC and the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which is now referred to as the Civil Rights Department.

Today's agenda is to we're going to help you identify what constitutes inappropriate behavior in the workplace and how that behavior can impact the people around you.

We're going to talk about how to create a safe and respectful workplace that is free from harassment.

We're going to help you understand your rights and responsibilities regarding discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and abusive conduct, and help you identify behaviors that might be considered inappropriate or unlawful.

We'll deeper dive into the nuances of gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.

Our focus on abusive conduct is also pursuant to the government code, which requires that in California, we provide training specifically on abusive conduct.

So just for some housekeeping, this presentation will be about an hour long, and then we're gonna break out into groups to go over some hypothetical group exercises.

I'll ask that if you could please try and save your questions until the end of the presentation just for time's sake, and we will I'll take the temperature and about an hour to see if anyone needs to take a bio break.

But we'd like to, the requirement is two hours.

So I'd like to try and fit everything within the two hours.

All right, so I think in order to have a comprehensive discussion about discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and abusive conduct, it's really important to understand the context of where we're at today and how we got here.

In the past five years, social movements have significantly informed how labor laws have changed, and also what rights and responsibilities that employees and employers have.

For example, in 2017, the Me Too movement made significant contributions to both federal and state law, specifically sexual harassment related laws.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way that employees show up to work.

We moved to an entirely remote environment to now a hybrid environment, and employers are now experiencing an increase of surge and return to work requests, remote workplaces.

That became a well-known phrase because we learned through the pandemic that your workplace can be extended beyond the physical location of your employer.

There's been an increase in social media use as well between employers and their employees.

And as you've seen, the number of social media outlets have also increased.

And these communications are happening off hours as well, which begs the question of what is the workplace and how can what are other forms where discrimination, harassment, and retaliation can occur.

Other significant events you want you see on there, the murder of George Floyd in 2021, the uptick in violence against members of the Asian American and Asian communities because of COVID-19 misinformation.

Increasingly in the past couple years, there's been anti-LGBTQIA legislation.