Effective July 1, Georgia small business owners will be shielded from any attempts to enact predictive scheduling mandates.
House Bill 243, spearheaded by Rep. Bill Werkheiser, prohibits local governments from implementing any measures that would require businesses to provide predictive scheduling to their employees. Under these laws, employers must set workers’ schedules well in advance—often about 25 days—and if that schedule changes after that point, the employer would be required to pay for the lost or adjusted time. For instance, if a restaurant schedules additional wait staff to handle a large party, but then the reservation is canceled, the restaurant owner would still have to pay the wait staff for the time they would have worked, even though they are no longer needed on that night. Similar ordinances have been approved at the local level across the country, causing employers increased labor costs and scheduling difficulty, so HB 243 was developed to preempt the issue in the Peach State.
Under current Georgia law, local governments are already prohibited from regulating certain issues, such as health, sick, and retirement benefits, and HB 243 adds scheduling to that list.
NFIB/GA applauds Gov. Deal and Rep. Werkheiser for taking action to protect Georgia small businesses from unnecessary mandates that limit their ability to succeed and create jobs.
