<p>A friend of mine told her 16 y/o daughter got a job at a local store (part of a national chain). She gets paid $8/hour (more than min wage) so she was ecstatic. Then she was told: she can only work 4 hours at a time, and she has to be “on call” the rest of the week. Which means she can’t get any other job. And at times, she’s been scheduled for a shift that started at 3:30, only to get a call at 3 pm from a manager who says “you know, it isn’t really that busy – we don’t need you to come in.”</p>
<p>Then I heard about another person (college student) working at J Crew – same thing. </p>
<p>I guess when you’re interviewing you should ask if you’re guaranteed a certain # hours and/or if you’ll be expected to be “on call.”</p>
<p>From the store’s standpoint, it’s smart – they can dial up workers as they see fit.</p>
<p>From the kid’s viewpoint, it’s this wierd twilight zone – you have a job, but you’re not working, and you can’t work for anyone else.</p>
<p>Is that legal? It must be, but I hate some companies’ tactics. A schedule should be final as the hours you are expected to work and the hours that you’re guaranteed to work. Anything on top of that would be asked as a favor to work extra hours.</p>
<p>I haven’t worked retail for about four years and I had other issues with management at the last place that I worked (including their ability to make schedules according to our availability) but I never encountered that. It doesn’t make sense. So many part time retail workers are college students - they have class, if nothing else. Nobody can keep 100% open availability for an $8 an hour job in any kind of long-term way.</p>
<p>I saw a sign outside of Burger King the other day that said “Paying $10 an hour for shorter shifts” - I figured it was a new way to save money and maybe keep employees - pay them more but only keep them there for the peak few hours - so instead of a shift being 11-7 or something, they pay someone for 11-2 and 5-7 and then save during the middle hours.</p>
<p>I do think some kids really get screwed. A popular summer job around here is at the zoo. My D worked there, my son’s GF works there. She gets called off or gets her hours shortened (they schedule her for 10-4 but send her home at 1pm or whatever) as often as she actually works. I think that’s a TERRIBLE employee/er situation. I think they need to have some rule that they can only call you off a certain times a month or certain % of what you are scheduled to work, otherwise they have to still pay you a wage.</p>
<p>We have the “on call” thing here too, and with the high price of gas it sometimes is not worth the kids driving 10 miles to the Mall for a short shift only to be sent home. My friend’s daughter was at Aeropostale and they would often cancel her shift if it was quiet. Glad to say she found a better job elsewhere!</p>
<p>I used to be on call (carried a pager) in a customer service (engineering) job. I think that they paid us for one hour for every eight that we were on call (though we were well-paid anyways). It meant that we had to deal with support centers around the world during the day or night and potentially travel to the customer’s site on short notice if required. The thing is that I always thought that this was part of the job - getting paid a little something for it was a bonus. Nowadays, this sort of thing is expected in general. We’re always available for emergencies and expected to check email on weekends and at night in case someone needs something done that isn’t an emergency - but would be nice to get done quickly.</p>
<p>Businesses are definitely under stress and they are trying to cut costs so this behavior (your inconvenience) sounds definitely like a management technique. I guess the best thing to do would be to find a job where there’s always work to be done in the retail store. If that’s a clothing store, then there’s work putting merchandise out, doing markdowns, moving things from one place to another. If it’s food service, then it could mean prepping things for later business.</p>
<p>If this overall trend towards schedule-inconvenience doesn’t work out, then it could be dumped. By working out - I mean people quitting over it after they’ve been trained - managers hate that.</p>
<p>My D is working for “JoAnne’s Fabric” store & is experiencing the same thing. The only employees that are full time are the “managers”, everyone else is part time, so they don’t have to pay any benefits.</p>
<p>I suspect this might be legal in some states and not legal in others. Even if legal, I would be surprised if retailers could get away with this in New York State except in the most financially desperate corners of Upstate or in metropolitan area operations that rely on immigrant labor.</p>
<p>This trend is hardly new. The grocery stores and hardware stores in our area have been doing this for a decade or more. Turnover in these jobs is incredibly high - and the reputation of these businesses as employers is incredibly low (Pick-n-Slave and Sent-me-home are a couple of well known nicknames for certain grocery chains around here).</p>
<p>Yes, same here. My D works at a popular chain clothing store…she will be scheduled for only one or two 4 hour shifts at a time, then have “on call” hours. But I guess she is fortunate, because the on call hours are on the same says she is already scheduled to work.</p>
<p>She also gets scheduled for the overnight shifts where they re-merchandise the store…I think last week she worked from 10 pm - 3:30 am. Glad the store is in a safe area, but I hate to have her out that late on a Saturday night.</p>
<p>Last year my son applied for a job at a hotel gift shop. They asked when he was available and he wrote down any time except Sunday mornings (he teaches Sunday School.) They called and said that to work there, he needed 27/4 availablity.</p>
<p>Mind you, this was a 12 hour a week job. So they expect people to forego any other employment to work 12 hours a week at minimum wage?</p>
<p>I was looking online for jobs for my son - I looked at the postal service web site. They want their part time new hires to commit to be availble 24/7 to go in to work in any post office in a 30 mile radius.</p>
<p>My son used to work for a grocery store. Yes, if sales were down that day, they’d send him home early. Okay, did that extra $7.25 they didn’t have to pay save the day? And as others have mentioned, only the managers are full time. When they want to get rid of someone (which starts once they make about $8.50 an hour), they just keep cutting their hours…a self supporting adult might go from 32 to 20 to 12 hours a week, until they just have to quit to find another job.</p>
<p>Pretty funny. How can these employers expect any dedication when they treat the employee with such disrespect?</p>
<p>When these kids get ‘real’ jobs they will probably just assume that this sort of extreme flexibility will hold in reverse - if they need a mid day break for a dr. appt or whatnot, they will be able to take it. But that is simply not allowed at many places, and can hurt one’s reputation with the boss.</p>
<p>I don’t know that they care…there is always the next kid asking for a job. It was extremely evident at the grocery store that they would rather have a new employee at minimum wage than a seasoned, loyal employee at a dollar an hour above that.</p>
<p>Williams Sonoma does the same thing. The on call thing had her end up quitting because she hated being in the middle of something and getting called in unexpectedly. Makes you unable to make any other plans.</p>
<p>They can do it because people put up with it.</p>
<p>My sister works full time at a chain retailer as a “key” – not quite a manager but close. She gets her regular hours but there are still frequently days where she is “on call,” or days where they tell her to call in at 3 and they’ll tell her then whether or not she works that day… sometimes she calls in at 3, they tell her “ehhh, call back in an hour,” and then, “ehh, call back in another hour,” and before you know it the whole day is over and she has spent the day by the phone waiting for nothing. It makes me irate, they are basically having her work for the day-- sitting by the phone calling every hour unable to go do anything else because they could call and ask her to come in any minte-- without paying her. This job has a LOT of shoddy employment practices. They tell her they’re going to fire her every time she gets sick, even if she comes in and does her job well, and she broke her ankle in the parking lot last summer and they told her they’d have to fire her if she couldn’t walk on it the next day-- as she is sobbing in the back room and waiting for the ambulance, bleeding all over herself. Nevermind that she broke her ankle stepping in a pothole in THEIR parking lot while she was on the clock. The employees also aren’t allowed to be friends, and if they suspect that you’ve befriended your coworkers they will fire you or transfer you to a different store. Seriously.</p>
<p>I had a job like this when I graduated high school in 2007, only it wasnt what was agreed to when I was hired. I was to have set hours, and I’d given my boss a copy of my school schedule and said “you can have me any time except during these hours.” He would only give me hours on the weekend, and would only call me Thursday or Friday to tell me what time to come in on Saturday morning-- say 8am. If I showed up at 7:55am, I’d get in trouble-- “why don’t you come in earlier?” mind you, the moment we walked in he would try to distract us so we couldn’t get our timecards punched on time and we’d get in trouble if we punched in when he required us to come in early, so no matter what he was getting an hour or two of free labor every morning and I was only getting 5-10 hours a week anyway. He wanted to call Friday, tell us to come in Saturday at 8am, and then have us REALLY come in at 7am and work for free until we punched in at 8am when we “really” were supposed to be there. I’d work all day Saturday until he decided to tell me I could go home, at which point he told me what time to come in on Sunday, if at all. Then he would call me all week during classes to ask why I wasn’t at work, when I wasn’t scheduled and he knew I was in class. So I NEVER knew if I had to work or when I was getting off until the exact instant he wanted me to walk through the door, one way or the toher.</p>
<p>I discussed it with him and told him I really needed a more set schedule if I was going to balance the job with my college responsibilities, and he promised he’d write me a schedule-- everyone else was on a schedule. But he never did, and I ended up getting a much better job at Borders and quitting. We ended up having to get an attorney because he refused to issue my W2 and was withholding $400 in unpaid paychecks.</p>
<p>Current trends show that the average college graduate will change jobs every 2-3 years. Can you wonder why? They graduate, in many instances can only find UNPAID internships or have a starting salary barely above minimum wage or are listed as contract workers without medical benefits. So much for employee loyalty or for job creation.</p>
<p>I had these kinds of jobs when I was a teenager. In general, I had scheduled work but they could call me and ask if I wanted to work an additional shift. These kinds of jobs were perfect for working while going to school.</p>
<p>Take summer forest fighters. You are on call to report to a forest fire within 72 hours. Once there’s a fire, you can make good money because you might work 100 week. But no fire = no work.</p>
<p>I had family who spent the entire summer on call and ended up working 3 days, because it was a wet year. He didn’t try that again.</p>
<p>. These kinds of jobs were perfect for working while going to school.</p>
<p>Not really perfect if you need a certain amount of hours to pay your expenses.
D worked two retail jobs while earning money for her gap program.The dept store in the mall required her to wear fashionable clothes from a high end dept, the job in the dept store /food chain required uniforms and it was also unionized so it paid better with more hours.</p>