GSBE Weekly Update 01/10/2018
Welcome, 2018! Get Ready For A Busy Year With Pending And New Bills That Can Impact Your Business. Contact Us For Questions Or Additional Information Regarding A Bill. Make Sure Your Voice Is Heard.
Scheduled to be introduced January 11th AB 1173: Flexible Workweek
California is one of only three states that requires employers to pay daily overtime after eight hours of work and weekly overtime after 40 hours of work. Even the other two states that impose daily overtime requirements allow the employer and employee to essentially waive the daily eight-hour overtime requirement through a written agreement. California, however, provides no such common-sense alternative.
Rather, California requires employers to navigate through a multi-step process to have employees elect an alternative workweek schedule that, once adopted, must be “regularly” scheduled. This process is filled with potential traps for costly litigation, as one misstep may render the entire alternative workweek schedule invalid and leave the employer on the hook for claims of unpaid overtime wages.
Currently, there are 33,037 reported alternative workweek schedules with the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement. According to the Employment Development Department’s calculations for the fourth quarter of 2016, there are approximately 1,498,017 employers in California. At best, approximately 2.3% of California employers are utilizing the alternative workweek schedule option. More realistically, however, given that the information in the database is according to work unit instead of the employer, it is likely that less than 1% of employers in California are utilizing this process.
AB 1173 would relieve retail industry employers of the administrative cost and burden of adopting an alternative workweek schedule by providing a small carve-out during the holiday season (November to January). Pursuant to AB 1173, at the request of the employee, an employer would be able to implement a flexible work schedule that allows the employee to work up to 10 hours in a day or 40 hours in a week during the holiday season, without the payment of overtime.
Employers should be able to provide their employees more flexibility and negotiate through a written agreement, revocable by either party, the daily/weekly schedule that satisfies the needs of both the employee(s) and the employer.