A Win For Retail Workers

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave a holiday gift to city retail workers on Tuesday, unanimously approving a package of measures “aimed at giving retail staffers more predictable schedules and access to extra hours”. Claire Zillman elaborates:

The ordinances will require businesses to post workers’ schedules at least two weeks in advance. Workers will receive compensation for last-minute schedule changes, “on-call” hours, and instances in which they’re sent home before completing their assigned shifts. Businesses must also offer existing part-time workers additional hours before hiring new employees, and they are required to give part-timers and full-timers equal access to scheduling and time-off requests. …

San Francisco’s proposal takes sharp aim at employers’ tendency to schedule workers’ hours with little notice—a practice especially prevalent in retail. Earlier this year, University of Chicago professors found that employers determined the work schedules of about half of young adults without employee input, which resulted in part-time schedules that fluctuated between 17 and 28 hours per week. Forty-seven percent of employees ages 26 to 32 who work part time receive one week or less in advance notice of the hours they’re expected to work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Bryce Covert cheers:

The bill’s passage comes at a time when erratic schedules are increasingly wrecking havoc on people’s lives, particularly in retail. Nearly half of part-time workers and just under 40 percent of full-time ones only find out their schedules a week or less in advance. In a survey of more than 200 retail employees in New York City, nearly 40 percent said they don’t get a set minimum of hours they’ll work each week and a quarter are required to be on call for shifts, often finding out just hours ahead of time that they’ll have to go to work. Many say schedules are posted on Saturdays for workweeks that start on Sunday. Workers also show up just to be told to go home thanks to computer software that uses algorithms to determine if there are too many employees compared to sales volume — McDonald’s employees have sued the company over its use of exactly this technology. At the same time, workers often struggle to get enough hours to survive. There are 7 million people in the country working part time who want to be full-time, an increase from 4.5 million in 2008.

Josh Harkinson zooms out:

Several states, including California and New York, already have “reporting pay” laws that require employers to pay workers extra if they send them home early from a shift. Last year, SeaTac, an airport town between Seattle and Tacoma in Washington, became the first in the country to require employers to offer additional hours to part-time workers before hiring new employees. But San Francisco’s Worker Bill or Rights goes much further than these efforts, and labor organizers expect it to help catalyze similar worker rights laws elsewhere.

Jobs for Justice, the group that lobbied for the San Francisco bills, is pushing similar measures in the Washington, DC, and Boston. Minnesota and New York are considering tighter regulations of “on call” shifts. Those two states and Michigan may also adopt laws that would bar employers from discriminating against part-time workers who request more stable schedules. The Service Employees International Union is pushing for a mandatory 30-hour workweek for security and janitorial workers in multiple states.

But Alana Semuels is slightly skeptical:

Vermont was one of the first places in the country to try to get a handle on inconsistent scheduling. … But the experience of Vermont indicates employers might not be getting the message. Even if wage-and-hour laws change, companies still operate on the same profit margins. And store managers are even more pressured to keep a lid on labor costs while dealing with the ups and downs of consumer demand, said Jennifer Swanberg, a professor of Social Work at the University of Maryland. They get data every week about sales for the previous week and how many hours they might need to staff for the upcoming week, and they need to be cautious about committing to too many hours. “The supervisor is often the person being squeezed between what senior management wants and what they have to do day-to-day,” she said.