I moved into the corporate world a couple years ago (thanks,Covid!) after spending around a decade in retail/service industry. When I worked at The Limited, Victoria’s Secret, and Target they would schedule pretty much all of the part-timers(95% of their staff so they don’t have to pay benefits) for 1 or 2 “on-call” shifts a week. The employees would have to call in to whatever manager was on duty an hour or two before the shift was a hour to start. You had to be able to work if they needed you(because the scheduled employee didn’t show up, or they were really busy) but if they didn’t need you, you were not compensated for ANY of that time. I heard that they make the employee call in to ask if they need to come in because, if it was the other way around, the company would have to pay for your time. Complete bullshit IMO.
I left retail as soon as I got wise to the fact that servers can make way more money in a shorter amount of time, but a couple of restaurants I worked at were guilty on this too. Please tell me that companies aren’t pulling this shit any more?