The search terms are tricky. “Irregular hours” can refer to to long hours, work outside of 9-5, or a schedule that changes in a regular fashion. I don’t care about that at the moment.
Many part-time workers who I know have trouble finding additional work or finding time for training and education because they don’t know ahead of time when they will be working. Or they’ll be asked to clock out during a slow period, but “stick around; if things pick up, we’ll ask you to come back in.”
I’m not aware of any regulations in this area in the US, but I’ve only worked in a few states, and not in many part-time jobs. Are there any? What about in other countries? Am I looking for something that has a name?
Under the deal I have with my boss, he can ask for overtime basically on a hour or two notice. But on the other hand, barring anything vital, I can take comp time on about the same notice. Full time, US, salary.
Thank you, Duckster. That’s going to be a slog, but at least I’ll have some bedtime reading this week.
I should have specified that I am posting in GQ because I am not interested in anecdotes. And since I wasn’t terribly clear in the OP, I am interested in the scheduling of part-time, hourly-paid workers.
I do the schedules for our small-staff retail store. We are part of a national chain. Many stores in our region, especially during the holiday, use on-call and call-in schedules for their seasonals and part-timers. My boss and I hate that and feel it is unfair to the part-timers, but the larger stores seem to think it is necessary and the higher-ups condone it. Which is probably a factor in the high turnover of seasonals and part-timers. We refuse to do it to our seasonals/PT people, and we try to work around other jobs.
We try to have our schedule for the coming week posted by Thursday of the week before. Not much notice, but at this time of year it’s just really us two and the Sunday guy, and maybe someone for a few hours on Saturday. If someone really needs to work/not work on a certain day, or if one of us is taking some PTO, I may do the schedules a couple weeks ahead. For Christmas, I will have the entire month of December scheduled by Thanksgiving week, following the metric the company sends out in advance and our unique needs. We hope to hire a new seasonal this year, and our general rule of thumb is that the job they have that pays them more takes first crack, so if they work another job it makes it tricky. Last year our part-timer had no other job so we could slot her in whenever we needed, and on short notice. This year she has another job with unchanging hours…we have to work around that.
The company tells us to schedule to the business’ needs, not the employees needs. That works great if your average seasonal employee is a middle-aged woman, married to a man making good money and an insurance plan, whose kids either can drive or are at college, and has a car of her own. Ideally she has no need for the money we are paying her, so she won’t care if one week she gets only four hours and the next twenty. She has no other job or volunteer responsibilities. Unfortunately, those aren’t the employees we get.
Search for “Unperdictable work schedules” . I’ve read a number of articles about the subject recently. None of them have mentioned that such schedules violate any law, and some advocate for new laws (requiring for example, that workers get a minimium amount notice of their schedule) so it seems there is no existing law.