As the battle lines are drawn in the increasingly polarizing debate over Seattle’s consideration of restrictive scheduling regulations, it is helpful to examine what the impact has been in the one city in the nation that has already adopted such rules.

San Francisco’s “Retail Workers Bill of Rights,” which took effect last year, requires “chain” restaurants and retailers in the city to provide workers with their schedules two weeks in advance with extra “predictability pay” penalties for shorter notice schedule changes, requires up to four hours of pay for on-call shifts when the worker is not called in and requires any additional hours to be offered to existing part-time employees before new part-time workers can be hired.  The law, which was pushed by labor unions, includes the typical exemption for unionized workplaces (from the regulations those same unions said were necessary to protect workers from being exploited by their employees).

The “predictability pay” penalties are stiff.  An employer who makes any change to a worker’s schedule (this includes changing the start or end time, cancelling the shift or asking them to work an extra shift) with less than 24 hours notice must pay the worker an extra two hours of the worker’s regular hourly wage if the shift is four hours or less, and must pay an extra four hours if the shift is more than four hours. 

So how is the city’s new scheduling law working out?  As Newton’s third law of motion puts it—for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

From the employer’s perspective, the restrictions are not only costly, they are cumbersome.   If a business needs to respond quickly to an unexpected event by staffing up (such a sports team that makes the playoffs, or a change in the weather), they have to offer extra hours to existing workers first (in writing) and wait 72 hours for those workers to decide whether they want those extra hours (in writing). 

For example, an unexpected warm weather streak in the city last summer increased consumer traffic for many retailers; businesses say they were unable to call in extra staff and consumers were frustrated by the lack of sufficient service.  One grocer explained:

 “Supplies weren’t able to get out to the shelves.  It just kind of snowballed, and our customers had a bad experience….”

So the business is on hold for three days before they can hire the extra staff they need, and to make things even more difficult for employers, everything must be in writing and records kept for three years.  As Carlos Solórzano, CEO of the Hispanic Chambers of Commerce of San Francisco, points out:

“This out-of-date approach to running a business creates a mountain of bureaucratic paperwork that requires more money, resources and staff.”

Not all of the headaches are caused by unexpected events.  The manager of a movie theater says in her industry, “we might not know until the Monday before the Friday a film shows.” She says the city’s new law “complicates the issue [of scheduling workers] tremendously.” 

From the worker’s perspective the impact of the rigid restrictions can be just as harmful.  Solórzano says an unintended consequence of the law has been that when employers can’t hire the extra staff they need, or don’t want to bother with the bureaucratic morass the restrictions have created, they simply make their existing employees do more with less.

And The Washington Post reports that as a result of the “predictability pay” penalties, “some workers grumble the law discourages employers from offering extra shifts on short notice…even if workers would be happy for the chance to pick up more hours.”

As Solórzano sums it up:

“The local law not only causes problems for employers, but also on the lives of the workers it claims to protect. Essentially, employees are locked into a two-week fixed schedule and unable to secure additional hours and income. If an employer has an opportunity to offer an employee additional hours at the last minute, the employer is forced to pay a penalty. In the end, employees lose flexibility, hours and income.

 

How is a business to handle patrons coming in before closing time? In that scenario, the employee could pick up additional work hours to accommodate last-minute customers, yet the employer would be forced to pay a penalty for changing the worker’s schedule.”

There is more than just anecdotal evidence that San Francisco’s restrictive scheduling laws are hurting employers and workers alike.  A recent study of businesses impacted by the rules reveals 35% of employers have become less flexible with employee schedule changes, 21% are offering fewer part-time positions, 19% are scheduling fewer workers per shift, 17% are offering fewer jobs across the board, 6% are pursuing self-service automated alternatives to hiring workers, and another 6% say they are reducing customer service.

These are exactly the unintended consequences Seattle business leaders, and workers, have been warning against.