But our research suggests that regulations that impose some semblance of order on workers’ hours could have an even bigger impact on workers’ well-being than a raise. Seattle’s legislation requires such employers to provide at least two weeks’ notice of work schedules. New York’s law requires that fast-food workers get 72 hours’ notice of shifts, bans last-minute shift cancellations, and forbids on-call shifts. At the federal level, a “Schedules that Work Act” was last introduced in Congress, in 2017, but it languished. We often hear calls to “make work pay,” but for workers’ lives to be manageable, employers also need to make work predictable.

Source: National Post June 27, 2019 14:13 UTC