Legal Question in Employment Law in California

Re: Scheduling Exempt Employees

You are best-advised to consult with an attorney who can review all of the relevant facts with you.

While there are no laws that require you to schedule employees based on seniority, you are best-served by adopting a neutral system for assigning shifts -- so that everyone is treated the same. Seniority is one way of doing that. If you have no method for assigning shifts, employees might claim that you assigned shift based on race or gender, etc.

A more important question for you is to make sure that your exempt employees are really exempt. Many employers in CA have gotten hit with multi-million dollar judgments for improperly classifying employees as "exempt," when their job duties, lack of discretion, etc., means that they should be paid overtime.

There are similar problems with 24 hour operations who use "on-call" employees. It would make sense to have all of these issues looked at by an attorney who has all of the facts.