The United States primarily regulates pay and hours through two rules that were initially established in the Fair Labor Standards Act:
- An overtime rule requiring companies to pay 50 percent more for any hours worked beyond 40 in a given week. This rule helps cut down on the problem of overwork.
- A minimum wage rule requiring companies to pay at least a certain amount per hour to their workers. This rule helps cut down on the problem of low rates of pay.
Most reform initiatives tend to focus on expanding one of these two mechanisms. Lawmakers constantly discuss increasing the minimum wage and also float proposals like mandatory paid time off to combat other aspects of overwork.
But there is a third problem that gets relatively little attention, which is the problem of involuntary underwork. Many employers — especially in the retail and food service sector — create large pools of part-time workers and then schedule those workers erratically based on real-time estimates of labor need. Some workers like to work part-time because it fits well with the rest of their life, but millions of others do so involuntarily and suffer as a result.
In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by creating a right for certain employees to request full-time scheduling and a corresponding obligation for certain employers to grant such requests unless doing so would result in an “undue hardship.” To be eligible to make such a request, an employee will need to have worked at a job for three months. To be required to accommodate these requests, an employer will need to have 50 or more employees.
Our proposal is modeled off of similar rules established by the American with Disabilities Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, and state Workers Compensation programs, all of which require employers of this size to accommodate requests to return to full-time work for certain kinds of employees.
Because these kinds of employers are already required to have labor models flexible enough to accommodate certain scheduling requests — including requests to return to full-time work — we believe that they will generally be able to adhere to a new right to full-time scheduling without too many issues, especially if their competitors are generally subject to the same rules.