Toronto mother Samantha Henry wishes she could give her three young kids the simple things: a promise to watch her son’s volleyball game, to be home for dinner, to be there for bedtime.

But as a part-time, minimum-wage employee of the Metro grocery store chain, these are luxuries the Scarborough mom doesn’t have.

Week to week, she has no idea what her work schedule will look like.

In Ontario, employers don’t have to provide workers with their schedule in advance.

There are no penalties for cancelling an employee’s shift even an hour before it’s due to start.

There is no obligation to guarantee part-time workers a certain number of hours.

There is no law preventing more part-time workers from being hired before offering existing employees more hours.

There is nothing that saves part-time workers from being paid less than full-time workers — even when they do the same job.

Many low-wage workers desperately need to take on second jobs but can’t, because employers expect full-time availability from their part-time employees.

Experts call erratic work scheduling the “Wild West” of employment standards, a practice that causes havoc in the lives of millions of Ontario workers but is almost completely ignored by provincial law.

The result in many industries is a “brutal combination” of unpredictable schedules, insufficient hours and poor wages, says Deena Ladd, who heads the Workers’ Action Centre, a Toronto-based labour rights advocacy group.

Now, Ontario’s so-called “precariously employed” are demanding change on these issues, as Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government embarks on a review of employment and labour laws that is expected to conclude in August 2016.

“It’s just incomprehensible that we’re asking people in our province today to try to manage their lives under these kinds of conditions,” says Kendra Coulter, a professor of labour studies at Brock University.

So-called flexible schedules are often welcomed by employees who want greater control over their work-life balance. But for the growing number of people in low-wage part-time positions, “flexibility” provides little in the way of control or balance.

Forty-one per cent of work in Ontario is now done outside a full-time, permanent relationship with a single employer.

Henry, a mother to three children aged 11, 10 and 7, began working at a unionized east-end Toronto Metro store two years ago to help make ends meet. Her partner is in road construction, where the amount of work can vary drastically depending on the season.

Every Thursday, she receives her schedule for the work week ahead, which begins Sunday, leaving her just three days to figure out how to manage her family commitments for the coming week.

There is almost no buffer against the unexpected.

“If something comes up (with school), I’m either going to lose a whole day or I have to call in. And I lose those hours. I don’t get those hours back,” says Henry, 28.

She says her manager tries to be fair, but is hamstrung by company policy.

Each week, corporate headquarters gives store management a set number of hours to divvy up between departments, Henry says. Metro told the Star it was unable to comment on its operational policies, but large retailers commonly base such decisions on things such as projected sales and demand.

As a part-timer, the young mother has no say over how much work she’ll get — a minimum number of hours is not guaranteed. Currently she’s averaging about 25 hours a week at $11 an hour, but that could change at any time.

“I remember one week I was getting 26 to 27 hours, and then I went down to 17. So that’s a good 10 hours kicked off. You never know,” says Henry, who must have a wide-open schedule to snap up the hours she does get offered.

Expecting full-time availability from part-time employees, the action centre’s Ladd says, makes it difficult for many low-wage workers to take on much-needed second jobs.

Henry worries for when her partner’s work ramps up in the coming months: child care is too costly, so school-time shifts will be her only option.

“If (my manager) can’t give me those hours, I don’t get hours,” she says.

Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, last reviewed in 2000, is almost completely silent on the subject of scheduling, containing just one provision to protect workers.

The “three hour rule” forces bosses to give their employees three hours of pay if they arrive at work only to have their shifts abruptly shortened or cancelled. The rule does not apply to workers who are regularly scheduled to work less than three hours, which labour activists say is increasingly common.

Beyond that, employers have no responsibility to provide workers with a predictable schedule.

Despite the stress of an ever-changing timetable, Henry is one of the lucky ones. Her store is unionized, and Unifor’s collective agreement with Metro sets out some minimum scheduling standards, including the three-day notice.

That doesn’t make her volatile timetable much easier to explain to her kids.

“We kind of struggled with getting them used to the fact that I’m not at home. It’s random. It’s here, it’s there, it’s ‘Mummy, are you going to be home tonight?’”

Erratic scheduling is most common in booming sectors such as retail, where jobs tend to be low-wage and non-unionized.

In Toronto alone, the number of people employed in retail has grown by 34 per cent over the past 15 years, to more than 300,000 in 2014 from just under 227,000 in 1999.

Angelo DiCaro, Unifor’s lead researcher on the retail sector and a former Metro employee himself, says negotiating scheduling rights for union members is tough since there are no province-wide standards.

Flexible scheduling is popular with employers because it allows companies to spend less on payroll when sales slow down. Managers are often evaluated based on their success.

“It’s a pure efficiency argument from the retailers’ viewpoint,” explains Joseph Milner, a professor at Rotman School of Management. “The more flexible you can get your resources — your human resources, in this case — the more you would expect to get efficiencies.”

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In addition to keeping wages low, hiring a large pool of part-time employees who work limited hours minimizes employers’ obligation to pay benefits such as medical and dental. Even in unionized settings, workers must often work a certain number of hours to be eligible for such entitlements.

Mary Gellatly of Parkdale Community Legal Services argues this “shifts what’s traditionally been the cost of doing business onto workers, especially low-wage precarious workers who can least afford it.”

“The reality is that at this point (scheduling) is a ‘Wild West’ when it comes to employment standards,” adds Brock University’s Coulter, who calls the reforms proposed by the Workers’ Action Centre “thoughtful, comprehensive and achievable.”

She also points out that not all employers take advantage of loose rules.

Costco Canada, for example, guarantees its full-time staff 40 hours a week, and its part-timers 25 hours. Schedules are posted at least one week in advance, and both full-time and part-time employees are entitled to health benefits.

The upshot, says Ross Hunt, the company’s vice-president of human resources, is one of the lowest employee turnover rates in the industry — 12 per cent, compared with the retail average of about 21 per cent.

“It gives (workers) a better quality of life. And if they’re stable and they stay with us, it’s great for us, too,” he told the Star in an interview.

But the political push for province-wide standards has so far lagged. In the U.S., the proposed federal Schedules that Work Act sets out much stronger protections, including mandatory two-week scheduling notice for many low-wage sectors.

The Act will face tough passage through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but that hasn’t stopped San Francisco from enacting game-changing municipal legislation with similar provisions, including providing retail workers with two weeks’ notice of their schedules.

“I think we’re way behind many jurisdictions in the U.S. where they’re trying to put a halt to the unfettered growth of just-in-time scheduling,” says Parkdale’s Gellatly.

But campaigners say the Ontario government’s current review of the Employment Standards Act is a golden opportunity to fix what the action centre’s Ladd calls a “massive, gaping hole” in the province’s laws.

For Samantha Henry, even a modest amount of predictability in her work life would provide much-needed balance for her three young children.

“A lot of people in my work, we have families. We have kids,” she says. “And you can never plan.”

Proposed solutions

Sara Mojtehedzadeh can be reached at 416-869-4195 or smojtehedzadeh@thestar.ca .

A recent report by the Workers’ Action Centre on precarious work in Ontario recommends reforming the Employment Standards Act to:

Require two weeks’ advance posting of work schedules

Give employees the right to one hour’s pay if their schedule is changed with less than a week’s notice, and four hours’ pay if less than 24 hours’ notice

Mandate minimum three-hour shifts for all workers

Require employers to give existing part-time and casual employees preference for available hours before hiring additional workers

Give workers protection from reprisal when requesting schedule changes

Mandate equal pay for equal work, regardless of part-time or full-time status

BY THE NUMBERS

40%: Pay difference per hour between part-time and full-time workers in Ontario

$11: Median wage for a Toronto grocery store worker in 2014

60%: Grocery store workers in Toronto who are not unionized

88%: Retail workers in Toronto who are not unionized

87%: Retail workers in Ontario who are not unionized