Split Shift Premiums San Diego

As a business owner in San Diego and Southern California, it is important to have adequate staffing specially when you are busy. If no one is there to take care of the customers, then how are you going to make money? That is why some companies in San Diego and Southern California will schedule their employees for a Split Shift during the day. While having this option is incredibly convenient for your company and your customers, the state of California implemented an additional ripple in this scheduling plan that could make it an expensive venture. So what should businesses need to do?

First, let’s define what a Split Shift is – it is an elongated interruption to an employee’s workday that does not pay them and is established by the employer. Meal or rest breaks, which are typically an hour-long, do not count when you are determining if an employee is working a Split Shift. The time between these schedules must benefit the employee in some fashion by allowing them to leave the work vicinity for a long period of time.

Here is a good example of a Split Shift – you schedule a waitress in your restaurant in downtown San Diego from 10 am to 1 pm, then have the same waitress return for a 4 pm to 10 pm shift. This gives your worker three hours away from the work vicinity to do whatever they want. They could take a class, go food shopping or go pick their children up from school. Either way, this is their time.

So why is it important to make this Split Shift distinction? Because a worker who earns minimum wage is entitled to a Split Shift Premium when the business owner schedules them for a Split Shift. The premium that they are entitled to must be equal to one hour of pay at the minimum wage. That means you will be paying the waitress in the above example an additional hour while she is doing stuff that will benefit her. But if you want her to be available when your business is at its busiest, that additional hour of pay will be worth it in the long run.

Here are a few more important items that you should keep in mind while you are scheduling employees for Split Shifts:

• An employee that makes more than minimum wage can also be scheduled for a Split Shift, but the premium you will have to pay them will be lower.
• Anyone that resides at your business is exempt from the Split Shift premium.
• It is your responsibility to keep track of Split Shift premiums.
• If the employee asks or volunteers for a Split Shift, you do not have to pay them a Split Shift premium.
• Split Shifts have no bearing on overtime pay.

While it is convenient to schedule Split Shifts in some of your employees’ workdays, it is important to remember that you must compensate them for this. It might seem like a waste of money, but the cost of paying your employee’s Split Shift premium should not overshadow the amount of scheduling flexibility your company obtains from implementing them. As long as you have employees available while your business is busy, you will make that money back.