Irregular work hours (Seattle, Issaquah, Starbuck: 2015, home, employment)

[UNITIME]

I am hired as a full time warehouse employee, 8hours day/40 hours week and some overtime. My boss does not like to pay overtime. There are occasions he will send me home after only being at the office 2-3 hours and then asks me to come back later that night to complete my 8 hour shift. I live very far from my office and going back and forth to work is hard on my gas. I don't mind coming late, only the commute back and forth on the same day and I'm not being compensated for the extra gas. Is this legal?He will also tell me to take a day off on a weekday and make me come in on a weekend. I am not getting compensated higher rate on nights and weekends.

[CrazyDonkey]

Very common. You're lucky you're getting your 40 hours. Many are stuck working on-call/short shifts, including open/close split shifts, adding up to much less than full-time, which disallows taking a second part-time job, for instance.

One option might be to offer to work the worse shifts (swing/graveyard), in return for more consistent and contiguous hours. Can you trade hours with other employees? Other options: don't go home (but to the beach, library, coffee shop, etc.) and look for another job (go to the employment office, instead of home).

[KBrown28031]

no this is not common. I would get out of there as quickly as possible.

[CrazyDonkey]

It's a lot more common than you think. And becoming more common. Especially in lower-skill non-union jobs in retail, warehousing, etc. The idea is to cut labor expenses by minimizing overtime and benefits - if your competition is doing it, you'd better too. Ten years ago, they didn't have the software to do it, nor a workforce conditioned, by hard times, to accept it.

Unpredictable Work Schedules Are a Big Problem For American Workers - The Atlantic

‘Clopening’ time: Seattle on the clock for secure scheduling | CHS Capitol Hill Seattle

The utilization of new scheduling software by employers and managers has been identified as a major cause of irregular scheduling. Starbucks has come under fire in recent years for its scheduling policies, specifically its utilization of scheduling software designed to maximize company efficiency by predicting store traffic and corresponding required staffing levels when and where. Advocates say the software incentivizes managers to under-staff stores, keeps employee hours at part time levels (which also allows employers to avoid giving full-time employee benefits and overtime), and quickly patch together weekly schedules from a large pool of part-time employees, often with little advance notice for the employee.

[Hemlock140]

I know a guy that worked in the Issaquah FedEx warehouse, he worked a split shift every day, and had to basically take a 4 hour unpaid lunch.