Restaurant Labor Laws: Predictive Scheduling | Crunchtime

There seems to be a lot more news lately about Predictive Scheduling Laws for restaurant operators. If you haven't heard of this yet, you probably soon will, as these new restaurant labor laws are picking up speed across the US.

It's a good thing that "being predictive" is at the heart of what Crunchtime is all about. After all, the key to managing your labor costs is to be really good at predicting well in advance what your employee labor schedules should look like. So, if you're already a Crunchtime customer, don't worry, you've got all the enterprise-grade restaurant labor tools needed to nail down compliance for all current and pending predictive scheduling laws.

Below is a refresher of those Predictive Scheduling Laws for restaurants from a really good resource: www.HRDive.com

Overview of current and pending laws

San Francisco was the first to enact scheduling regulations with its Formula Retail Employee Rights Ordinance in 2014. Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance and Emeryville and California’s Fair Workweek Ordinances took effect July of this year. New York City’s law will take effect November 2017.

San Francisco employers must:

• Provide employee schedules at least 2 weeks in advance;
• Make no changes to the employee schedule with less than seven days notice; changes made past that deadline would mean employers will have to pay the employee 1 to 4 penalty hours pay; and
• On-call employees must be paid 2 to 4 hours if they are not required to work.

Seattle employers must provide:

• Rest between shifts to avoid clopening;
  • “Clopening” is when an employee closes the location and opens the next morning. Shifts cannot be scheduled less than 10 hours apart, unless the employee consents: in that case, employers must pay time-and-a-half the employee’s hourly wage for the hours separated by less than 10 hours.
• 14-day advanced notice of schedules; and
• Compensation for schedule changes after posting:
  • Added hours must include one additional hour of pay beyond hours worked.
  • Subtracted hours paid at half the hours scheduled.
  • On-call hours, if the employee is not required to work, paid at half the hours scheduled.

New York City employers must:

• Post schedules at least 72 hours in advance of any shift;
• Not cancel, change or add work shifts within 72 hours of the start of the shift; and
• Schedule retail employees for no less than 20 hours for each 14-day period.

Similar legislation is now being considered in 13 states and four municipalities. Matthew A. Steinberg, Partner at New York’s Akerman LLP, discussed predictive scheduling in a recent podcast. He predicts that, as “predictive laws continue to expand into new jurisdictions and industries, there will be pressure on employers seeking to attract the best talent to voluntarily adopt predictive scheduling policies.”

Derek Jones, VP or Business Development at Deputy, a workforce automation company, sees a correlation between the drive for predictive scheduling and other employment law advocacy. “I think it’s safe to say where there has been an appetite to drive the minimum wage to $15, so predictive scheduling laws will follow,” Jones told HR Dive.

Read the full article at HRDive here.