A North Vancouver teenager is warning other young job-seekers to be wary of unpaid trial shifts, a practice that continues in B.C. despite being illegal.
In May, Kathleen Kearns, 18, joined the throng of students looking for summer employment.
Competition for these jobs is fierce during the spring months, so Kearns was overjoyed when a small family restaurant in North Vancouver agreed to give her a try at serving, despite a lack of experience.
When she arrived for her interview, one of the servers had not shown up and so, according to Kearns, the manager asked her to stay and help as it got busy. But the manager warned it would be a "trial shift" and she would not be paid.
Kearns said she worked five hours that night, running food, speaking to customers, refilling water glasses and fetching beverages.
"I didn’t care about getting paid. I was just happy to get the job," she told The Vancouver Sun.
"If I ask for this money or to be paid for this shift I feel like are they going to say, ‘Yeah, maybe she’s not going to work out’ and then they won’t hire me. It’s a scary thing to do."
Over the next five weeks, Kearns said, she was asked to work only three shifts. She said she kept calling the restaurant and then one day was told it wasn’t going to work out because they didn’t have time to train her properly.
"If I hadn’t got that job, I could have been looking for another one. I totally missed the boat," said Kearns, who now works odd jobs such as babysitting.
A manager at the Lynn Valley Road restaurant, called Munch, agreed she asked Kearns to stay and help out as an unpaid training shift, but said Kearns only worked for about an hour, not for five.
The manager, who refused to give her full name, described Kearns as a disgruntled employee upset because she was fired for being an underage server.
She acknowledged that unpaid training shifts are illegal but said they happen often in the industry.
Kearns’s father has since launched a complaint with the Labour Ministry’s employment standards branch.
Rod Bianchini, regional manager of the Lower Mainland employment standards branch, said some restaurants could be using interviews to save money during their busy times.
"This is just a way to, in essence, get three or four hours of free work from these people," he said.
"But you can’t make people do that just by calling it an interview shift. If an employer is interviewing 10 to 20 people – well, that would be a whole week’s worth of work for free. Especially if these interview shifts happen at dinner time."
Complaints to the branch range from employees not getting paid for meetings because the employer calls them "parties," to employees being told they must pay for uniforms, broken dishes and dine-and-dash incidents, all in contravention of the law.
And there are hundreds of complaints about people working training shifts without pay.
"Does trying people out and not paying them happen? Yes. Often? Yes. It is a regular source of complaint," said Bianchini.
The Ministry of Labour said it does not compile data on unpaid-interview-shift complaints, but said that last year, 11.5 per cent of the complaints to the employment standards branch were from restaurant employees. The B.C. Federation of Labour said that over the past year, it has received at least one complaint a month from a young person about unpaid training shifts in the food and retail sector.
Many restaurant owners or managers don’t realize they are crossing the line when conducting an interview shift, an industry expert said.
"It is okay to ask someone to demonstrate their ability to cook a hamburger or carry a tray … but the question they need to ask is, ‘Am I serving customers that hamburger? Are they eating it?’" said Gillian MacGregor, a human resources adviser at the British Columbia Restaurant and Food Services Association.
Mark Thompson, an expert in labour issues at the University of B.C. Sauder School of Business, called the practice "honest ignorance" on the part of most restaurants, but said some wilfully violate the law.
"As a father, I ask whether this is how we want our kids to enter the labour force – to see that people cheat? Is this the kind of society we want to create where young people learn that shady practices are acceptable?"
He has heard many complaints from students about the "trial shift scam," he said, but because they don’t pursue the matter officially, the practice continues.
In 2003, the Liberals amended the Employment Standards Act, including removing a provision that required the restaurant industry to post a statement of rights in the workplace.
Thompson said more education and a statement of rights would help because it would give young employees a point of reference to engage in meaningful dialogue with their employers.
NDP labour critic Raj Chouhan said he was troubled by what he called the exploitation of youth in the service industry.
Chouhan is urging the government to crack down on unpaid training shifts by changing the law to include mandatory statements of rights in the workplace.
ticrawford@vancouversun.com
Comments
Want to discuss? Please read our Commenting Policy first.