Nearly every California employer has owed a workplace violence prevention plan since July 2024. Most of them wrote one. The part almost nobody is doing is the log — and an empty log is not evidence of a quiet workplace.
When SB 553 took effect on July 1, 2024, most employers did the sensible thing: they obtained a template workplace violence prevention plan, filled in the company name and a responsible person, delivered the training, and filed it.
That satisfied the visible half of Labor Code §6401.9. The invisible half is a violent incident log. If yours has no entries in it two years on, the rest of this post is about why that is not the reassurance it looks like.
An empty log is sometimes accurate. It can also mean that incidents happened and were handled the way incidents have always been handled at that company — a conversation in the yard, a supervisor separating two people, a driver reporting a customer who got in his face, a note in somebody's phone — and none of it reached a log, because nobody thinks of those as violent incidents.
Since July 1, 2024, nearly all California employers — with narrow exceptions, including certain small operations at remote or inaccessible worksites — must establish, implement, and maintain an effective written workplace violence prevention plan. Its required elements are specific:
The log entries are not a one-line summary. Each records the date, time, and location; the workplace violence type; a detailed description; the classification of who committed the violence; the circumstances, including what was happening before and during; where it occurred; the type of incident, including whether a weapon or other object was involved; consequences; and information about who completed the log — with personal identifying information of the persons involved omitted.
The retention rules are in §6401.9(f): violent incident logs, hazard identification, evaluation and correction records, and incident investigation records for a minimum of five years; training records for a minimum of one year. And the records must be made available to employees and their representatives, on request and without cost, within 15 calendar days.
That last provision is the one operators underestimate. A record that must be produced to a requester in fifteen days is a record that gets read by somebody adverse, at a moment of their choosing.
Four reasons.
The definition is broader than the intuition. The statute's categories reach far past assault. Threats count. Verbal aggression that carries a threat of physical harm counts. Incidents involving customers, clients, and visitors count, not only employees. The dock confrontation that ended with someone walking away is an incident. The road-rage encounter a driver reported to dispatch is an incident.
Nobody was given a way to report. The plan says reports are accepted. In practice there is no form, no channel, and no expectation — so the report goes to the supervisor verbally and stops there. A reporting procedure that exists only in a document is not a reporting procedure.
Field incidents never reach the office. In dispersed operations the whole event happens between two people at a jobsite or on a route, is resolved locally, and is genuinely forgotten by the following week. Not concealed. Forgotten.
Logging feels like creating evidence. This is the one nobody says out loud, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a euphemism.
The instinct is that an empty log is safer than a log with entries in it, because entries are admissions.
Work through what each document actually shows in the hands of somebody arguing the employer knew and did nothing.
The log with entries and dispositions shows an employer that identified incidents, evaluated them, and did something about each one. It contains bad facts. It also contains the response to every bad fact.
The empty log does not show a quiet workplace. It shows either that no incidents occurred, or that the reporting mechanism the statute requires does not function. Which of those is true will be established by testimony — the employee who reports that she told her supervisor in March, the driver who says he called it in, the text message somebody kept. Once one such incident is established, the empty log is no longer neutral. It is a documented failure of the system the employer was required to maintain, sitting next to a specific incident it should have captured.
The log with entries and no dispositions is the worst of the three, and it is the one produced by an employer that starts logging without deciding who closes items. It is a list of incidents the employer knew about and a matching list of nothing done.
The nearly universal structure of enhanced liability in this area is knowledge plus an absent documented response — and a documented response does not have to have succeeded to count. That is the whole reason the entry beside the incident matters more than the incident does.
The enforcing agency is the Division of Occupational Safety and Health. Cal/OSHA has been enforcing §6401.9 directly under the statute while the corresponding Title 8 general-industry standard proceeds through rulemaking — public comment on the draft closed June 1, 2026, and adoption is required by December 31, 2026. Expect the regulation to add specificity on top of the statute; re-verify the final text once it is adopted instead of relying on any description written before it, this one included.
Penalties run on the ordinary Cal/OSHA citation schedule — the same one that governs the heat standards, $16,285 for general and regulatory violations up to $162,851 for willful or repeat, on 2025 figures that should be re-checked in January 2027. The standard first-inspection findings here are the absent plan and the absent log.
The same gate applies too. Workplace violence is a Division 5 obligation, so any PAGA route runs through §2699.3(b): the notice goes to the Division, and a citation forecloses the PAGA action on that violation. Realistically, the exposure here is citation exposure.
We make no claim that this record produces a PAGA benefit, and we will not put it near one. The argument for keeping it well is narrower, and we think it is enough on its own. Section 6401.9 obliges you to keep the log whether or not anybody helps you keep it — so a log exists in every lawful version of your operation, and the only live question is which version you have. An empty log is not a saving. It is the same obligation, discharged badly.
Ask three field supervisors to describe the last incident they handled. Not a formal audit — a conversation. Then look for those incidents in the log. The gap between what people remember and what the log contains is the size of your reporting problem, and it takes an afternoon to measure.
Look at whether any entry in the log has something written under it. If entries exist and dispositions do not, that is the more urgent of the two problems, and it is fixable this month by deciding who closes an item and requiring them to say what was done.
Two documents answer most of this: the plan, and the training roster. Bring them to a discovery call and we will tell you what the statute requires the record to contain and where yours is thin. Whether any particular incident carries further obligations is a question for your counsel.