The city’s new law, which passed the city coun­cil on Thurs­day, will require busi­ness­es with more than 250 employ­ees and more than 30 loca­tions world­wide to pro­vide employ­ees their sched­ules at least 10 days in advance. If any changes are made to their sched­ules after that, employ­ers will owe employ­ees more mon­ey. Employ­ers will also be required to offer more hours as they become avail­able to exist­ing employ­ees who want them rather than hir­ing new peo­ple, and they’ll be banned from retal­i­at­ing against those who either request or decline more hours.

Philadel­phia, the poor­est big city in the coun­try, just enact­ed the most sweep­ing bill yet to give low-wage work­ers some con­trol over their schedules.

The law is poised to have a huge impact: A recent sur­vey con­duct­ed by UC Berke­ley found that among food and retail sec­tor work­ers in Philadel­phia, 62 per­cent receive their sched­ules less than two weeks ahead of time and two-thirds work irreg­u­lar or vari­able sched­ules. Almost half usu­al­ly work 30 hours or less each week even though less than 15 per­cent have a sec­ond job to sup­ple­ment their incomes.

“It seems that employ­ers are being less and less cog­nizant of their work­ers’ needs and home lives,” not­ed Nadia Hewka, an employ­ment lawyer with Com­mu­ni­ty Legal Ser­vices of Philadel­phia, which advo­cat­ed for the bill. ​“This would just put a lit­tle bit of bal­ance back into that equation.”

The effort to help work­ers con­trol their sched­ules start­ed around a year ago, when advo­cates con­vened to dis­cuss how Philadel­phia could take action on its own to improve liv­ing stan­dards for its res­i­dents. ​“Philadel­phia is a very high-pover­ty city,” Hewka not­ed. More than a quar­ter of the city’s pop­u­la­tion lives below the pover­ty line. So advo­cates were inter­est­ed in ​“any­thing that we can do to raise the bot­tom just a lit­tle bit.” But thanks to a state pre­emp­tion law, the city can’t raise the min­i­mum wage — that pow­er is reserved for the state gov­ern­ment. So the city coun­cil has turned to a num­ber of oth­er mea­sures that can make life for work­ing peo­ple eas­i­er: paid sick leave, an anti-wage theft ordi­nance, a salary his­to­ry ban, ban the box leg­is­la­tion and now a fair sched­ul­ing law.

“What I know is that I can’t be par­a­lyzed just because the state has lim­it­ed our capac­i­ty to be able to direct­ly raise the min­i­mum wage,” said Helen Gym, the first-term coun­cilmem­ber who intro­duced the fair work­week bill. ​“We have to talk about oth­er things that impact people’s lives and could also improve them.”

The for­mer com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er came into the coun­cil look­ing for some­thing that could ​“real­ly grap­ple with this incred­i­bly vast and intractable sit­u­a­tion around deep and entrenched pover­ty in our city.” As she spoke with low-wage work­ers and those who work with them — teach­ers, lawyers, anti-pover­ty advo­cates — every­one brought up how unsta­ble sched­ules were dis­rupt­ing people’s lives. ​“This was a major, major issue,” she said.

“As a munic­i­pal­i­ty, we have to do some­thing,” she added. ​“We have the author­i­ty and the respon­si­bil­i­ty to act here as one of the largest cities in the coun­try.” Her col­leagues appar­ent­ly agreed: ​“It has been one of the most pop­u­lar bills to move through our coun­cil in a while,” she said.

While oth­er places, such as Ore­gon, New York City, San Fran­cis­co and Seat­tle, have sim­i­lar sched­ul­ing leg­is­la­tion, Philadelphia’s goes fur­ther by cov­er­ing work­ers in all indus­tries, not just those in retail. ​“Of all the bills that exist around the coun­try, ours will be the most far-reach­ing,” Gym not­ed. Hewka cred­its the involve­ment of UNITE HERE Philly, which rep­re­sents hotel and restau­rant work­ers and advo­cat­ed for the bill.

Hewka sees the new law as an anti-pover­ty mea­sure. It’s dif­fi­cult ​“when you don’t know how many hours you’re work­ing and how much you’ll be earn­ing by the end of the week or the end of the month to make the bills you need to make,” she said. Someone’s income isn’t just deter­mined by her wage, but by how many hours she works. A more pre­dictable set of hours, and the abil­i­ty to get more as they become avail­able, can make a big difference.

And there are oth­er ben­e­fits to a steady sched­ule. Hewka not­ed that many peo­ple feel that if min­i­mum wage work­ers don’t like their pay they should get bet­ter jobs. ​“How are you sup­posed to improve your lot in life and go to school if your class sched­ules are set and your work sched­ule always changes?” Hewka not­ed. It’s also near­ly impos­si­ble to hold down a sec­ond job to make ends meet if the first one is con­stant­ly shifting.

The bind is par­tic­u­lar­ly tight for par­ents. ​“When [work­ers] are not allowed to have a say in their sched­ules,” Hewka said, ​“it impacts their entire fam­i­ly.” One big hur­dle is find­ing child­care to fit a work sched­ule when that work sched­ule is con­stant­ly shifting.

On top of that, par­ents have to get their chil­dren to school, doc­tors’ offices, after-school activ­i­ties and oth­er appoint­ments. Poor fam­i­lies are also often nav­i­gat­ing the demands of wel­fare offices or child ser­vices, Hewka point­ed out, all of which typ­i­cal­ly require day­time appoint­ments. ​“All of these sys­tems assume that you’re avail­able to do these tasks,” she said. She has even had clients fail to show up to meet­ings in her office because they had to be at work instead.

“Jobs don’t rec­og­nize [work­ers’] human­i­ty, let alone these kinds of demands on their lives,” she added. ​“You’re spin­ning plates up in the air with all of these things in your life. A work sched­ule chang­ing can real­ly cause every­thing to come crash­ing down.”

Gym hopes not just to improve Philadel­phi­ans’ work­ing lives, but to make a big­ger impact. ​“We’re try­ing to change the way in which we talk about pover­ty and the nature of work these days,” she said. ​“Not only did we set a stan­dard for what hap­pens around the state, but we sent a mes­sage across the nation that we need to see an eco­nom­ic jus­tice agenda.”