An Act to amend and reenact § 9.1-702 of the Code of Virginia, relating to hours of work for paid firefighters.
HB1333 amends Virginia’s work-period rules for calculating overtime compensation for fire protection and law-enforcement employees. The bill keeps the existing framework allowing employers to use a recurring, fixed work period of between seven and 28 days, but clarifies that the schedule cannot be altered to avoid paying overtime that employees are otherwise owed under state law.
The bill also directs the Department of Fire Programs to encourage employers to adopt schedules for paid firefighters that do not require their normally scheduled shifts to exceed 42 hours per workweek. For law-enforcement employees, the statute continues to apply only to employers with 100 or more law-enforcement employees, preserving the existing size-based limitation.
HB1333 updates § 9.1-702 of the Code of Virginia and affects overtime and scheduling practices for paid firefighters and certain law-enforcement employers. It does not create a new overtime system, but it reinforces the rules governing work periods used to compute overtime and adds a policy preference against routinely scheduling paid firefighters beyond 42 hours per week. Employers in covered public safety agencies may need to review scheduling practices to ensure compliance with the fixed-work-period requirement and overtime protections.
The available record shows no committee transcript or recorded vote details, so there is no direct evidence of debate or opposition in the provided materials. Based on the enacted chapter text, the bill appears to have been treated as a technical or workforce-management measure aimed at clarifying overtime and encouraging more manageable firefighter schedules. Its enactment suggests at least sufficient legislative support for passage.
No specific points of contention are documented in the provided materials. The main policy issue implicit in the bill is balancing employer flexibility in setting 7- to 28-day work periods against employee protections from overtime avoidance. Another possible area of concern is the practical effect of the 42-hour scheduling encouragement for fire departments, though the statute uses nonbinding language and does not impose a hard cap.