‘On call’ ?needn’t be ?no life

I’ve written before about the problems facing workers who are at the whims of their employers – shifts that are scheduled a week or less in advance, on-call periods for which they’re supposed to be available on short notice to work but might not get it. This is obviously bad for the workers: It plays havoc with their schedules, making it difficult to schedule child care and, of course, rendering it impossible to take on a second job. The New York attorney general agrees and is now questioning 13 major retailers, including Gap and Sears, about their practices.

The problem is that once you start to find legal remedies, you fall down a bit of a rabbit hole. How do you prevent retailers from basically making it impossible to have a life while working for them, while also allowing economically beneficial transactions?

After all, obstetricians and other medical practices have “on call” hours, and we don’t really want to ban those.

Maybe we should restrict on-call hours to salaried workers. But I’ve been on call as an hourly worker, and I was happy with that arrangement. There are plenty of folks – say, college students – who have the time for sporadic work, and they would be unhappy if they couldn’t get it.

- Advertisement -

Maybe we should restrict on call to a certain proportion of work hours. But again, there are people who want all the hours they can get, and others who can only work sporadically.

Ultimately, the problem is not the law. It’s that employers can get away with forcing workers to commit large chunks of their waking hours just for the chance of picking up a few shifts.

Here’s one solution that might thread the needle: Require employers to pay for the privilege of using workers contingently. I’m not saying that they should have to pay minimum wage, but require them to pay something – say, $1 an hour – for putting people on call. If the option is still economically valuable, they’ll use it. If it’s not, then the deadweight losses from banning on call are probably pretty minimal anyway.

Better still, of course, would be to work on the opportunity side, so that people aren’t forced into contingent labor in the first place. n

No posts to display