BILL NUMBER: AB 357INTRODUCED BILL TEXT INTRODUCED BY Assembly Members Chiu and Weber (Principal coauthor: Senator Leyva) (Coauthors: Assembly Members Bonta, Chu, Gonzalez, and Roger Hernndez) FEBRUARY 17, 2015 An act relating to employment. LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST AB 357, as introduced, Chiu. Employment: work hours: scheduling. Existing law, with certain exceptions, establishes 8 hours as a day's work and a 40-hour workweek, and requires payment of prescribed overtime compensation for additional hours worked. This bill would make legislative findings and declarations relating to work hour scheduling for employees of food and general retail establishments. Vote: majority. Appropriation: no. Fiscal committee: no. State-mandated local program: no. THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS: SECTION 1. This act shall be known, and may be cited, as the Fair Schedule and Pay Equity Act. SEC. 2. The Legislature finds and declares the following: (a) More than one-half of food and general retail store employees nationally receive their work schedules one week or less in advance. (b) According to a recent survey of employees at chain stores and large stores, only 40 percent of those surveyed have consistent minimum hours per week and the vast majority of employees find out from a supervisor if they are needed for the on-call shift a mere two hours before the shift starts. Retail industry research in New York City found that more than one-half of family caregivers in the retail industry are required to be available for on-call shifts, forcing them to arrange for child or elder care at the last minute. (c) Women are also more likely than men to work part time and experience unpredictability in their work schedules; one study found that women were 64 percent of the frontline part-time workforce among retail workers. (d) Unpredictable scheduling practices and last-minute work schedule changes cause workers who are already struggling with low wages to live in a constant state of insecurity about when they will work or how much they will earn on any given day. These practices also make it hard for employees to plan their finances and to plan for and obtain child care. These practices also prevent part-time employees from pursuing educational opportunities or holding a second or third job that those workers may need to make ends meet. (e) According to census data, since 2006, the number of "involuntary part time employees" in California nearly tripled to 1,100,000 employees. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than one-half of the retail workforce nationwide works fulltime, and the number of those working fewer than 20 hours per week has grown by 14 percent in the past decade. (f) According to a survey conducted in 2014 of workers who sell food in California, the largest producer of food in the United States, they are twice as likely as the general populace to be unable to afford sufficient quantities of the food they sell or the healthy kinds of food their families need, despite the financial health of the food retail industry. According to this same survey, workers who were Black or Latino were far more likely to be sent home early with no pay, to have a shift canceled on the same day it is scheduled, to not be offered a lunch break, or not be paid for all hours worked. (g) For these reasons, to ensure family and financial stability for a vast segment of California's workforce, those employed by food and general retail establishments should be afforded some predictability and dignity in how they are scheduled to work.