Lodi business leaders and employees consider work scheduling bill
California shift workers whose lives have been increasingly disrupted by on-call work scheduling could be in for relief if a new state law is passed this year.
Introduced in January by State Sen. Connie M. Leyva, D-Chino, Senate Bill 850 seeks to reign in irregular and on-demand scheduling practices used by many large retail and food service employers in the name of maximizing efficiency.
Under the law, businesses like grocery stores, restaurants, and retail chains would be required to create employee schedules which span at least three weeks. Employers would also be required to post new schedules at least one week in advance.
“We hope this bill will create stability for the workers, so that the workers will know when they’re going to work,” Leyva said. “Also employers can’t just take away my hours because we see that that happens a lot, too. That, you know, I’m scheduled for four hours, six hours, eight hours, and if the employer determines that it’s slow, you lose those hours. With this bill, you would be partially paid if you lost those hours.”
Additionally, penalties for businesses which break the new rules would include modification pay for affected employees in cases where shifts are canceled or other instances of unplanned schedule modification occur. Depending on the infraction, administrative penalties can cost $50 for each day an offense occurs per employee. If employers ignore the infraction for too long, the penalty could stack up to a maximum of $4,000.
Some worry about how employers will react if forced to pay more. The California Chamber of Commerce said the bill would bury employers in penalties and stifle workplace flexibility for both the employer and employee.
“It’s a job killer,” said Dave Kirsten, a board member of the Downtown Business Alliance of Lodi.
The Downtown Business Alliance of Lodi’s main goal is to promote, support and expand Downtown Lodi business. Kirsten said he’s sympathetic toward employees who want reliable schedules and pay, but he sees the bill as a doubleedged sword.
“You can cite individual examples where it benefited the employee, but you can also cite examples where it minimized people’s opportunities,” Kirsten said. “If I raise the cost of my products, statistically, there’s just no arguing it costs me volume. So if you look at today, if you raise the cost of labor, then it’s going to cost you jobs, and statistically there’s just no way to argue that.”
Even some shift workers directly affected by the bill wonder how employers will adapt to the legislation.
“More people could benefit than others,” Lodi resident Aminah Mozeb said.
Mozeb attends San Joaquin Delta College and works as a classified substitute for the Lincoln School District, as well as for McDonalds. She said her life is greatly affected by how much she’s on call. However, she’s still worried about not just how employers will react, but if employees will become more apathetic towards the job.
“All the time I would get called in before my shifts. I would be called in on my days off. I would be extended after my shift also,” Mozeb said. “I get the overall thing is to help… If they think they’re going to get paid either way, maybe they won’t care so much if they work or not, and I think that will affect how they work; how much effort they put into their work.”
The law, which makes exceptions for shift changes when another employee is sick or doesn’t show up for work, sheds a light on the unprecedented expansion of high-tech, automated scheduling software which can now be found in thousands of retail chains and other low-wage businesses across the country.
Dr. Daniel Schneider, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and a principal investigator for The Shift Project — a joint employment research initiative between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco — said most automated scheduling systems, which optimize employee work time with considerable precision, are not only inconvenient for workers, but also hazardous to their health.
“Not knowing the time you're in, needing the hours you get quite badly, and yet worrying that if the store is slow, you might get sent home; we see for (on-call) workers that it's pretty strongly associated with being less happy compared to other workers in the same firms.” Schneider said. “We see that having these schedules is associated with lower sleep quality. In the end, people are more depressed.”
According to Schneider, studies have shown that the adverse effects of automated on-call scheduling can often outweigh the benefits businesses expect out of such systems. He said businesses which reverted to scheduling methods which offer increased regularity saw increased sales on average.
“These (scheduling) algorithms are designed by people, and people who haven't necessarily thought everything through.” Schneider said. “That's not to say they couldn't take on workers’ preferences, or make things more predictable.”