Is your firm in compliance with the new NYS Sexual Harassment Policy and Training Requirements?

As previously reported, as of October 9, 2018 all employers were required to provide their employees with
a Sexual Harassment Policy. If you don’t have one in place yet, you can build off of the NYS template here. Unique to contractors bidding state work, starting January of 2019 all contractors must begin affirming “under penalty of perjury” that they have a written sexual harassment policy and provide training to all of their employees. All employers are required to train current employees by October 9, 2019.

New employees should be trained as quickly as possible. All employees must complete sexual harassment prevention training at least once per year. This may be based on calendar year, anniversary of each employee’s start date or any other date the employer chooses.

AGC NYS investigated and researched many sexual harassment training options and has reached an exclusive agreement with Benetech to offer an on-demand training webinar. The webinar takes roughly 45 minutes to complete and is compatible with both desktop and mobile devices, allowing for easy administration at the office or in the field. In order to assure compliance with the NYS contract language certifying compliance with this requirement, we urge contractors to either adopt the AGC/Benetech training solution or something similar as soon as possible. As of April 26, over 50 AGC member firms are utilizing the Benetech online training solution. Even though employees have additional time to receive the actual training, the certification contractors must make under penalty of perjury makes it critically important that you have a training solution in place.

To claim your exclusive pricing package with Benetech as an AGC NYS member, click here.