From unstable & unpredictable to balanced & flexible

How secure scheduling works for retail, food, and coffee workers in Seattle

Fair Work Center and Working Washington reach tens of thousands of workers across the state, with especially extensive reach in the service industry, in communities of color, and with immigrant and refugee groups. Fair Work Center provides Know Your Rights trainings and other outreach & education resources to workers and community-based organizations, and also offers a unique legal clinic. Working Washington organizes to raise labor standards, including leading the effort to pass secure scheduling in Seattle. As the legislature considers a statewide secure scheduling bill this year, we thought it would be helpful to share our experiences implementing the secure scheduling ordinance Seattle passed in 2016.

Coverage:

Secure scheduling benefits tens of thousands of people who work for large food, retail, and coffee chains in Seattle, like McDonald’s, Olive Garden, and Target. There have been additional spillover effects, as many companies have implemented improved scheduling procedures across their entire operating region, which often extends beyond the city limits.

Key benefits:

• Advance notice: workers get at least two weeks’ notice of their work schedules so they can plan their lives — make appointments, spend time for their families, maybe even go back to school.

• Access to hours: Current employees get a shot at additional hours before additional part-time workers are hired.

• Balanced lives: Employees get input into their schedules, and employers are required to do what they can to accommodate employees’ needs related to caregiving, school, a second job, and other major life events. On-call scheduling is discouraged, and employers are barred from requiring “clopens” (back-to-back late night & morning shifts).

• Expanded flexibility: Employers are incentivized to create shift-swapping systems, so workers can provide each other additional flexibility.

Common questions we hear about secure scheduling:

• What if there’s a last-minute event?
  Life happens and late-breaking changes can of course be accomodated. Employers simply have to pay modest “predictability pay” if they require a worker to come in for a shift with less than two weeks’ notice to account for the impact on workers. In Seattle, employers are required to pay an hour of additional wages for each shift added after the schedule is posted.

• What if an employee wants to leave or early or change their schedule?
  Employees can request schedule changes same as ever and employers can grant them without triggering predictability pay. The same is true for employee-to-employee shift swaps.

• What about double shifts and split shifts? Different people have different opinions about whether these are healthy practices, but the Seattle law does not affect either.

• Who collects the penalties and where do they go? Predictability pay is simply compensation to the employee for accommodating a last-minute schedule change. It goes to the worker, not the government. Much like time-and-a-half pay for overtime, it’s simply a form of compensation, not a “penalty” or “fine”.

• What about restaurants where there’s not always a clear “clock-out” time? In order to accommodate the realities of service industry jobs, Seattle’s law allows a grace period of 15 minutes before any predictability pay kicks in.