Activists and workers staged a rally near the Cheesecake Factory in Pittsford Plaza yesterday, coordinated by Metro Justice, to call attention to “fair scheduling” regulations being considered in Albany.
The regulations, which have been proposed by the State Labor Department, would provide important benefits to hourly workers, particularly those in fields such as restaurants, retail, and child care. If approved, the rules will require employers to give workers at least 14 days’ notice of their work schedule, and the workers would receive extra pay for last-minute changes in their schedule.
The new regulations “will have a significant impact on low-wage workers,” says Mohini Sharma, an organizer with Metro Justice. Currently, those workers not only lose pay when schedules are changed without advance notice, but the unpredictability also makes it hard for them to find child care and keep personal appointments and commitments.
Before drafting the new rules, the State Labor Department held public hearings and took testimony from workers and business representatives. The regulations are posted on the State Labor Department’s website, labor.ny.gov/schedulingregs, and a 45-day comment period began in November.Â
Online comments about the Labor Department’s proposed regulations can be sent to hearing@labor.ny.gov.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2017.
The new regulations “will have a significant impact on low-wage workers.” This is the absolute truth. Restaurants will rush to replace employees with kiosks, robots, and other technologies that eliminate the negative ramifications of a proposed law that kills the ability of a restaurant to bring in extra help on anything less than 14 days notice. Anyone wondering why Western New York has become a jobs desert should look at proposed laws like this. The stupidity of people pushing laws like this that will result in more unemployment is just astounding.
Fowler obviously missed last weekends article in the D&C about the high level of automation coming to McDonalds restaurants in the Rochester. It will take some time to work all the bugs out, but as they do, the number of workers demanding fair scheduling will decline. And it will not be just McDonalds that automates, but its competitors as well. Lowes, Home Depot, Costco, and the like keep increasing the number of self service check out lines in their stores, consumers move more and more each year to buying on the no service internet, and I cannot remember the last time I made a hotel or airline reservation by talking with a live human being.
Well, there you go again. The most intelligent people in the room, the dems, can’t even do basic math. Or do they know what’s going on and just want more unemployed that will be dependent on THEM?
This is a simple matter of some employers in certain fields needing to be nudged toward behaving ethically with regards to scheduling. A 2-weeks-in-advance schedule is VERY reasonable and employees LOVE it.
Simple matter to schedule 2 weeks in advance? Try telling that to any business dependent on the weather, such as Bristol Mountain, Sea Breeze, any restaurant with lots of outdoor seating, etc.
Since you qualified your statement with “Some employers in certain fields”, it’s tough to tell if you’ve allowing that some employers absolutely can’t schedule perfectly 2 weeks in advance, or if you are suggesting that some businesses are just too stubborn to schedule that way.