Management Rights - AELE's Home Page

CHAPTER 14 - CHANGING
SCHEDULES
The working hours of bargaining unit members have been held to
constitute a mandatory subject bargaining. 1 In the absence of any
restriction in the collective bargaining agreement, a municipal employer
may change employees' schedules to enhance coverage or in an effort to
reduce overtime costs. Even where no contractual constraints are
present, the employer must provide advance notice to the union of the
intention to change the schedule and, if requested, bargain in good faith to
either agreement or impasse over the impact of such change on
mandatory subjects of bargaining.
In municipal public safety departments which operate on a 24 hour per
day, 7 day a week basis, traditionally there has not been the same
pressure to reduce overtime by avoiding assigning employees to night or
weekend shifts as there is in the case of many private employers.
However, as the inclusion of night and weekend differential clauses in
contracts increases, the pressure may mount on chiefs to consider such
extra costs in determining scheduling and in making vacancy replacement
decisions. Holiday pay is another area which might receive consideration
for schedule adjustment. Many police and fire contracts pay every
employee eleven extra days' pay -- generally at straight time -- in lieu of
computing holiday pay for those who actually work on the legal holiday.
There would be little benefit to adjust holiday schedules in such cases.
However, where holiday pay (often at premium and even double time rates)
is tied to actual work on a holiday, savings may result if a skeleton crew is
assigned to holidays.
In addition to the economic justification, there is a strong public policy
favoring the avoidance of overtime pay. In fact, the purpose of premium
pay is to discourage the scheduling of overtime as much as possible. The
Fair Labor Standards Act is specifically intended to encourage the hiring
of additional employees rather than overworking current employees by
making it expensive for an employer which schedules employees outside of
their normal work week.
Since private employers, in an effort to reduce expenses and increase
profits, have attempted to rearrange schedules to avoid overtime, many of
the arbitration decisions in this regard involve non-municipal employers.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts