Human Resource Blog

Work schedule requirements

I was told after creating our 2009 work schedule that it needed to give the employees 2 consecutive days off in a week. By law. I make the calandar very favorable to the employees because I have to work it also. I mentioned that according to that logic one could be off for 2 days have to work 10 and then have their other 2 days off at the opposite end of the cycle. And you telling me this is legal? Please help I can’t find anything on schedules. We are in the telecommunications business.

There is no federal law that requires employees to be off one day per week, much less two consecutive days per week. A few states, including Illinois, have a law that employees must be off one day per week. In Illinois, it is called the One Day Rest in Seven Act. But only a handful of states even have that law. If you believe you may be in one of those states, post another question mentioning your state.

So in most states, it is legal to schedule employees 7 days per week if you want to. In fact, they could be required to work 365 days per year and 366 days during leap years. It is also legal to give an employee two days off, but split them up. For example, an employee might be off on Tuesday and Friday this week, and on Thursday and Saturday next week.

By the way, it is legal to schedule an employee to have the first two days off this payroll week, work 10 days straight and then have the last 2 days off in the next payroll week. In fact, many employees would prefer to be scheduled this way, because it would mean working 10 days, then being off for 4 consecutive days.

The only legal requirement under federal law, and in most states, is that non-exempt employees be paid overtime when they work more than 40 hours in the payroll week. If your boss is claiming that employees must have two days off in each payroll week, this is probably why. S/he wants to avoid overtime. If the employee works 48 hours this week, and 32 hours next week, the employee is averaging 40 hours per week. Regardless of that, the employee is still entitled to 8 hours of overtime for the first payroll week.

If your employees are complaining about the schedule, then you can probably ignore it. We do not want to sound cynical, but there has probably never been a schedule written that someone did not complain about. It is the nature of scheduling that you cannot please all the people, all the time.

It sounds like you have a rotating schedule to cover all days of the week. If you have a fairly small team, you can sit everybody down and thrash out the schedule together, trying to reach a consensus. Sometimes employees accept an idea more readily when they feel they had input. However, if you have a larger team, this will not be possible and you will probably just have to listen to a few gripes, and move on.