As cities all over the state have raised their minimum wages in recent years, labor advocates in the Bay Area are turning to what they see as another piece of the puzzle for improving workers’ lives: scheduling.

From ensuring workers get the full-time hours they desire, to preventing retaliation against them for turning down last-minute schedule changes, several initiatives are aimed at making employees’ schedules more stable and reducing underemployment.

“Now, it’s about getting fair wages and fair hours,” said Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE).

Business interests have railed against the idea of regulating scheduling across diverse sectors, and warn of unintended consequences that could actually hurt workers looking for additional hours and flexibility in their schedules.

Angie Manetti, director of government affairs for the California Retailers Association, said that has already happened in San Francisco since that city’s Retail Workers Bill of Rights was passed last year. Managers now choose to leave shifts unfilled to avoid penalty pay from scheduling workers on short notice, leaving heavier workloads on the employees who are working, she said.

San Jose’s Opportunity to Work initiative, an ordinance on the ballot Nov. 8, would require businesses there to offer extra hours to part-time employees before hiring more workers.

The initiative would apply to businesses with 35 or more employees but exclude government jobs and allow companies to apply for a “hardship” exemption.

Dilsa Gonzalez, a San Jose resident who has held a variety of positions in the fast food sector there, hopes the measure will support people like her. Gonzalez works 16 hours per week, but she would like to work 40. When she asks supervisors for additional hours, they tell her there is no work available.

“But then they hire other people,” Gonzalez said through a translator. She tries other means of making money, including recycling or helping her husband, a mechanic, work. But in San Jose, it’s “hard to survive with just a few hours of work,” she said.

“There is a crisis of underemployment in Silicon Valley,” said Ben Field, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, which gathered the required signatures to place the measure on the ballot. “It’s symptomatic of a problem across the country in which more and more wage earners are dependent on part-time work as a main source of income.”

Matthew Mahood, CEO of the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, counters that the San Jose ordinance would “pit workers against each other” for full-time hours rather than creating more jobs and that the ordinance is too far-reaching.

Meanwhile, in the East Bay city of Emeryville, the City Council passed its “Fair Work Week Initiative” last week.

The initiative requires retail and fast food establishments that have more than 56 employees globally to:

• provide employee schedules two weeks in advance of their shifts;

• allow employees to decline schedule changes that happen within seven days of the changed shift;

• offer extra hours to part-time employees before bringing on new ones;

• provide employees with extra pay for taking on shifts on short notice, known as “predictability pay.”

The initiative also would require employers to allow employees to deny back-to-back closing and opening shifts and to request alternate work schedules without retaliation.

Emeryville has often been a trendsetter when it comes to passing worker protection legislation, EBASE’s Lin said. That includes the $14.44-per-hour minimum wage it established last year that at the time was the highest in the nation. She hopes to push the effort throughout the East Bay in the near future.

Moriah Larkins, an Oakland resident who has worked in retail in Emeryville for five years, is among those who say the unpredictability of retail scheduling has made life difficult. As a single mother, Larkins said, taking on last-minute shifts was difficult because child care is not easy to schedule, but she also often did not get scheduled as many hours as she wanted to pay her bills.

She now works at Home Depot, where her schedule is more secure, allowing her to plan better for her family and financially, she said. Home Depot store manager Lionel Stevens said at the City Council meeting that it issues schedules three weeks in advance, and has an open-door policy for employees who need flexibility.

A study commissioned by Emeryville indicates that relatively few workers believe work scheduling has a negative effect on their life. According to the study, 87 percent of employees said they have influence in creating their schedules, and 76 percent said their schedule has never changed with less than 24 hours of notice.

A separate study led by the backers of the Fair Work Week initiative, EBASE, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Center for Public Democracy found different results: that more workers — roughly two-thirds — get their schedule less than a week in advance and want to work more hours.

Many workers believe an ordinance is needed to close any loopholes for businesses who are not scheduling fairly.

Kelby Peeler, a Union City resident who worked at Barnes and Noble for seven years, said he would often be scheduled 30 hours one week and 10 the next, making it impossible to plan financially, and he often lost sleep with late-night closing shifts paired with opening shifts the next day.

“There are definitely good actors — it’s not like every store is having these problems,” Peeler said. “But you can’t have your schedule based on the whim of a manager.”

By ANNIE SCIACCA

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