EDITORIAL: Fair Workweek Ordinance not perfect, but Council should still pass it

In the new American economy, workers could use a little more help in juggling jobs, family care and other responsibilities. They also deserve a little extra pay when the boss rewrites a work schedule on short notice.

It’s been a growing problem. Companies have increasingly resorted to employing workers on a “permanent temporary” basis — offering no benefits such as health insurance, calling workers in at the last second, and posting work schedules with little or no advance notice.

Employers say they need that “flexibility.”

We say, sure, but not at the price of petty exploitation.

An ordinance scheduled to go before the City Council’s Committee on Workforce Development on Tuesday would level the scales a bit. It would establish greater scheduling predictability for workers and compensatory pay for last-minute changes.

Our one major reservation with the measure, which is still being tweaked, is that it exempts too many local employers from the new rules. We urge the committee, all the same, to approve the proposal on Tuesday, and we urge the full Council to do the same on Wednesday.

We’re not alone in having reservations. Some advocates for low-wage workers say the measure, subjected to months of negotiations, has been watered down too much. Business groups, for their part, say it hasn’t been watered down enough.

But compromise is the art of seeing the glass half full.

Former Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th), who first introduced the ordinance along with former Ald. John Arena (45th), said he’s reminded of the big fight that played out in 2016 when the Council wanted to require businesses to give employees paid sick days. The original proposal called for a minimum of nine sick days a year, but that was negotiated down to five.

“But we went from zero to five, “ Pawar said.

There’s much to like in the proposed ordinance, which would cover workers in airport support services, building services, health care, hotels, restaurants, retail, manufacturing and warehouses.

• Employees would get their work schedules at least 10 days in advance for the next two years, and 14 days in advance after that. Employers would not be allowed to schedule workers to start a new shift less than 10 hours after they have worked a previous shift.
• Workers would get an extra hour of “predictability” pay if an employer added extra time to their posted schedule. They also would get that extra hour of pay, at minimum, if the employer changed the day or time of a posted shift.
• If workers are sent home early, perhaps because of a slow night, they would still get 50% of their pay for the rest of the hours on their shift.
• Flexibility is built in for times when employees and employers agree on requested schedule changes.

What we fail to understand, however, is why these new rules would apply to some employers but not others, effectively leaving thousands of unlucky workers out in the cold.

For example, if restaurants owned by chains with more than 250 employees and 30 locations worldwide would have to follow the new scheduling requirements, as called for in the draft ordinance, it hardly seems fair that other restaurants — which are exempted — would not.

The employees of the exempted restaurants do the same work and are no less deserving of the new protections.

We also question why companies with fewer than 100 full- or part-time employees are exempted, compared with 50 in earlier versions of the ordinance. That revision in the draft ordinance also leaves a lot of workers without protections. And nonprofits with fewer than 250 workers would be exempted.

Among the issues still to be settled is whether the ordinance will cover salaried workers and whether there will be a cutoff on how much hourly workers can earn and still qualify for the protections.

Even after the City Council votes, there will be an opportunity to tweak the rules when the Department of Office of Labor Standards draws up the final regulations.

Workers deserve a fairer shake. It’s not enough to extoll the virtues of the “job creators” if the men and women who do those jobs are poorly paid and cavalierly treated.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.