Will the State Schedule Your Employees?

03.06.2015
Issues & Policies

Two proposals in the Labor Committee could put the state in charge of scheduling some of your employees, and at a cost:

Under HB 6933, employers would have to provide hourly employee work schedules a minimum of 21 days in advance.

If an employer has to change an employee’s shift with more than 24 hours’ notice, the employee would have to be paid one hour in “predictability pay.”

A shift change needed with less than 24 hours notice would require the employer to pay up to four hours of predictability pay for any affected employee.

HB 6877 requires owners of office areas of 100,000 square feet or more, or a multi-family dwelling of 50 units or more, public or private institutions of higher education, or museums, to guarantee a minimum of 30 hours per week for any person they employ or contract to provide janitorial services.

The biggest question is: Why? Both of these bills are massive intrusions into the workplace, and attempts to squeeze blood from a stone.

Presumably, if an employer could afford to schedule an employee for more hours, they would already be doing that.

Instead, HB 6933 forces an employer to schedule employees for shifts they may not be able to pay for. If there are not customers coming in to a business to make purchases, how can an employer justify maintaining their full staffing?

Schedule changes are made for a variety of reasons, all the time, in order to accommodate lots of factors, including business flows, weather, other employees’ illnesses and schedules, and more.

Ironically, surveys of the impact of paid sick leave show that in many cases, when an employee is out, the business shifts the work to another employee. Under HB 6933, the company could be penalized for doing what the paid sick leave mandate is forcing them to do.

What happens if a snow storm forces a business to shut down for a day? What happens when a daycare, subject to a state mandated child-to-teacher ratio, has an employee call out sick for the day?

HB 6877 makes certain businesses guarantee 30 hours of work to any person providing janitorial services. Does that mean that if you have two part-time employees providing 15 hours of janitorial work a week, one of them needs to be fired?

The biggest question is, what exactly are the proponents of these bills attempting to accomplish? If it is to guarantee a minimum income for certain service workers, then doesn’t it seem counterintuitive to raise the cost of doing business in the state?

Shouldn’t we be focusing on creating more jobs and opportunities?

For more information, contact CBIA’s Eric Gjede at 860.244.1931 | eric.gjede@cbia.com | @egjede

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