The next shift is never certain for some workers
For many employees in the retail and service industries, the practice of ‘on-call’ work requires them to call in to see if they are needed that day
The rise of so-called precarious employment in Canada — mainly work in the service and retail sectors — has brought with it some questionable employer practices that have staff stressed out and labour activists fuming.
They’re calling for the elimination of “on-call” shifts, a practice where management schedules shifts for part-time employees each week, but then requires them to call in ahead of their start time to find out if they’re actually working.
“It’s really quite troubling from a ‘good jobs’ perspective because it sometimes forces people into financial turmoil,” said Andrew Langille, a labour lawyer in Toronto.
“This is a growing problem for young workers in their 20s and 30s who make up a significant chunk of retail and service workers. I’ve seen pretty high rates of mental health issues among this group of workers. It also drives stress and anxiety to a pretty high degree.”
In recent months, lawmakers in the United States have taken notice of a growing discontent with volatile workplace schedules.
In April, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman sent a letter to a group of large retailers asking for more details on how they operate “on-call” shifts. He also questioned whether forcing employees to adhere to “on-call” scheduling was legal.
Schneiderman’s symbolic gesture sent ripples through the industry and pressured several large U.S. retailers to change how they book their staff hours.
In Canada, similar changes for worker rights are harder to come by, though there have been some inroads in recent months.
This summer, Unifor, the union representing Metro employees at stores in the Greater Toronto Area, reached an agreement with management to give staff more predictable schedules. Changes have also been made at some Loblaw stores in Ontario.
The supermarket chain reached an agreement with the United Food and Commercial Workers for a pilot project at its 60 Great Food and Superstores locations in the province. Under the plan, some employees will get more reliable weekly hours and everyone will receive more advanced schedule notice.
But the new standards at Loblaws don’t cover all staff members and that has left some employees frustrated.
In Ontario, complaints about lax workplace guidelines have pushed the Liberal government to launch a formal review of provincial labour laws, with an interim report due early next year.
Those findings can’t come soon enough for Emily Norgang, a senior researcher at Canadian Labour Congress, an umbrella organization for labour unions and other interest groups.
“Of the new jobs created in the past five years, more than half are precarious jobs,” she said.
“The recession really has just worsened the situation. Now we have this pool of unemployed workers and so it’s a lot easier for employers to overhire and then keep workers on call.” Determining how many Canadian employers utilize “on-call” shifts is difficult because companies aren’t required to report those types of labour practices, which are especially common in the food services industry and grocery stores.
A spokesman for Tim Hortons said its head office staff “do not have great visibility to the restaurant owners’ scheduling practices” of its franchisees, but that the company believes “on-call shifts are not the norm” across its operations.
Department store Hudson’s Bay Co. says it has made a conscious effort to avoid “on-call” scheduling and create employees’ schedules weeks, if not months, in advance.
While working as a server, stability has frequently been a challenge for Ottawa resident Aaron Quinn, who spent seven years at a restaurant that expected him to work at least one “on-call” shift each week. Quinn was expected to contact the restaurant each afternoon he was scheduled for an on-call shift to find out whether they actually wanted him to work.
To accommodate his employer, Quinn made the rest of his life secondary — including his college education. Most weeks he would duck out of afternoon classes to call the restaurant and see if they wanted him to work that evening..
The unpredictability impacted assignments at school, where his classmates would never be certain if he’d show up for group projects, he said, and weekend trips to Toronto hinged on whether he would be called in on a Friday night in the final hours before his shift was to start.
On the schedule, when factoring in the on-call shifts that never materialized into actual hours, a 40-hour work week could sometimes fall hours below what it looked like on paper, Quinn said.
What’s still undetermined is how retail- ers will respond as trends shift toward more predictability in work hours for employees.
Retail analyst Brynn Winegard says the industry has grown accustomed to using staff to “ladder-up and ladder-down” in peak times.
“If they can’t call in new employees to help service demand or send people home, they’re going to have to err on the side of less employees in the interest of costs,” she said.
“I think we’re going to see a lot more places that are understaffed.”