Latest on fair scheduling laws & how they could impact you

Fair scheduling laws are the latest trend employers need to be aware of to stay compliant and avoid big payouts and expensive legal battles.

In response to unpredictable schedules for workers in a variety of industries, including food service, retail and other “essential” professions during the pandemic, laws have been proposed and enacted that require employers to give workers adequate notice before changing their hours.

Many of these fair scheduling laws also put restrictions on “clopening,” when the same employee works a closing shift and an opening shift within 24 hours.

The Shift Project, an initiative from Harvard University, has kept track of the state of shift workers for the past several years. In a survey from fall 2021, the most recent period for which data was available, 64% of workers received less than two weeks’ notice about their work schedule.

Out of these employees, over a third received only a week of notice about their schedules. And 25% regularly received only 72 hours’ notice about the hours they’d be working.

Over 40% of employees surveyed said they had no input in the timing of their shifts, and almost two-thirds (65%) said they wanted a more stable and predictable schedule.

Shift workers also experienced other types of unpredictable and unstable scheduling issues, such as:

• Shift timing changes (57%)
• Clopening shifts (36%)
• On-call shifts (21%), and
• Cancelled shifts (11%).

People of color were more likely to experience these issues than their white counterparts.

Proposed legislation

To solve these problems, several laws have been proposed at the federal and state levels.

Earlier this year, the Schedules That Work Act was reintroduced in the House and Senate. The bill would require employers in certain occupations to provide their employees’ schedules two weeks in advance. It would also protect workers from retaliation if they need to ask for schedule changes. And it would require employers to compensate employees if they have to abruptly change workers’ schedules or make them work call-in shifts, split shifts and other irregular schedules.

Another federal law up for consideration is the Part Time Worker Bill of Rights Act, which would not only require large employers to give any available hours to qualified part-time employees before bringing on new people, it would also require employers to offer benefits such as family and medical leave and retirement/pension benefits to part-timers.

Potential impact of fair scheduling laws

These laws mirror several existing fair scheduling laws relating to scheduling that exist on a local level, including laws in Seattle and Philadelphia. And while they’re growing more popular because they’re beneficial for employees, they could be costly and full of new administrative burdens for employers.

With that in mind, employers in affected industries may want to huddle with Payroll and look at employees’ current scheduled hours and pay rates to see how these scheduling laws may impact your budget down the line. You may also want to give managers a heads up that it’ll become more important to anticipate staffing needs in advance and have schedules in place as early as possible.

We’ll keep you posted.