Two weeks advance notice, or you get paid more.

Image from silentsketcher.deviantart.com, via Fast Food News.

San Francisco is the latest American jurisdiction to find an answer to what are called, here in Britain, “zero hours contracts”. As reported by Claire Zillman in Fortune:

[San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, which is also the city council of that city+county] voted unanimously on Tuesday [25 November] afternoon in favor of measures aimed at giving retail staffers more predictable schedules and access to extra hours. The ordinances will require businesses to post workers’ schedules at least two weeks in advance. Workers will receive compensation for last-minute schedule changes, “on-call” hours, and instances in which they’re sent home before completing their assigned shifts.

The law applies to firms with twenty or employees in San Francisco and twenty or more locations (that’s according to Fortune, but Bryce Covert on Think Progress has it at eleven or more). It’s not clear from what I’ve read how the measure would treat franchises, in cases where the franchise holder has fewer than the threshold number of locations or employees but the parent company has more. Chains which use franchising to escape labor market regulation are already on the defensive in the USA, as Alan Pyke reports here.