Last Fall, the City of Minneapolis entertained a proposed policy concerning “Fair Scheduling” of employee’s work hours. This policy proposed a requirement (among other things) that employers post employee’s schedules (including on-call shifts) 28 days in advance, with changes in the schedules made within 24 hours.  As of October 15, 2015, the City dropped its endeavor to move forward with this policy, in lieu of focusing on passing its sick leave policy, which I wrote about in an earlier post.  However, given the movement toward higher minimum wage, paid sick leave and other mandatory employee benefits, I suspect this is an issue that Minneapolis – if not Minnesota – will revisit again in the near future.

Minneapolis is not unique in its thinking. In fact, on February 25 2015 a bill was introduced in the Minnesota House titled the “Fair Scheduling Act” and thereafter in the Senate (SF1330).  However, the bill sat and became nothing more than talk and speculation.  This is not the case in San Francisco, however, where it is leading the nation again in progressive employee policies (having recently enacted the first 6 week paternal leave policy which I wrote about earlier in a post).  The Formula Retail Employee Rights Ordinances (commonly called the “San Francisco Retail Workers Bill of Rights”) put requirements on San Francisco employers of retail workers (as well as their related janitorial and security contractors) concerning hours, retention, scheduling and part-time employee treatment.

Such policies will certainly create an administration nightmare for employers and HR professionals.  While Minneapolis has dropped the issue for now and Minnesota failed to pass any new laws, it is likely to come up again in the future.  What can employers do in the meantime?  Sign up for my blog email and certainly I will do my  best to keep you all in the loop as these issues develop (that is the whole point of this blog, after all!).  Otherwise, the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry has numerous email lists that you can sign up for notifications such as pending regulations – as does the U.S. Department of Labor.  The links here will take you to their email list sign up.  Similarly, if you have a particular presence in larger cities such as Minneapolis and they have their own department of human rights, they too may have an email list that you can sign up for.  These often will alert you to proposed regulations, news of importance, and other noteworthy updates – the only problem is that you get a whole lot of other stuff too.  My intent is to weed through of all it for you, make sense of it all and the implications, and keep you in the know!  Stay tuned!