J. Crew has agreed to end on-call shifts for all of its employees across the country, as well as to give them at least a week’s notice of their schedules.
That means employees will no longer have to make themselves available to work — lining up transportation, child care, and any other necessary arrangements — without knowing whether they will actually be asked to come in and get paid for their time.
The company’s announcement is the latest after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to 13 major brands asking about their scheduling practices and investigating whether those practices violate state law. In New York, employers must give workers four hours’ worth of pay if they are sent home before the end of their shift, something he said might rule out on-call scheduling. Seven other states and Washington, D.C. have similar laws on the books.
Since those letters went out, five other retailers — The Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, and Urban Outfitters — have also changed their scheduling practices.
The issue also came up for Starbucks, which made some scheduling changes last year after an investigation by the New York TImes, pledging to end “clopening” shifts, or those where employees have to close stores late at night and come back in hours later to re-open the store, and give employees more notice of their schedules. Even so, some workers say that they are still being made to work clopening shifts and get their schedules less than a week in advance.
Chaotic scheduling is coming under fire in other ways. Earlier this month, both Forever 21 and BCBG were hit with lawsuits from current and former employees in California alleging that they are required to be available for on-call shifts without the guarantee of any pay, which might violate state law. Lawmakers have also taken notice. San Francisco passed a law last year requiring large retail chains to give employees at least two weeks’ notice of schedules and pay them for on-call shifts where they aren’t brought in to work. A similar bill has been introduced in Congress, although it hasn’t made it out of committee.
All of these actions are in response to a widespread problem. More than half of employees in the service sector say they get their schedules a week or less in advance, while about a third rarely have a consistent schedule.
Among retail workers specifically, more than a quarter have irregular schedules — working on-call shifts, two shifts in the same day, or rotating shifts — while 40 percent of those in New York City say they have no set hours week to week. This not only makes things like transportation, child care, education, or second and third jobs very difficult, but also makes it hard to budget and know what kind of income a family will have week to week and month to month.