“You lose an enormous amount of personal autonomy.”

Hurley would work 30 hours on a good week. The next, she might clock in 10, even though still she had to be ready to come in within an hour of each call. That made it hard to find other part-time work to smooth out the unpredictable hours, and her income fluctuated wildly, although the payments for her car, student loans, credit cards, cell phone, and groceries stayed just the same.

Hurley’s experience with call-in shifts has become a common tale in the retail industry. Chains keep employees on the hook up until the last minute, a move that costs them nothing and helps minimize labor costs. Software helps them understand staffing needs in real time, and evidence suggests a national chain can save tens of millions of dollars a year by keeping workers on call and canceling at the last minute, rather than paying for an hour or two of work by staffers sent home when business is slow.

This wreaks havoc on employees’ lives. Staff who miss making a call in the window prior to a shift, or who do call but cannot make it to work on time, typically receive the same punishment as someone who skips a regularly scheduled shift. At Urban Outfitters, company policy says on-call shifts “are considered scheduled shifts, and the same attendance policy applies,” according to a company handbook shared with BuzzFeed News.

Ray Mitchell, 28, who worked at an Urban Outfitters in Atlanta starting in 2013, said on-call scheduling “held you hostage for what you could do each day.”

Reading Sapna Maheshwari’s excellent essay on “on-call” shifts brought back a whole avalanche of memories: I worked at Urban Outfitters in 2005, and if I’m remembering correctly, I’m pretty sure I had the same handbook as the one cited here.

When I worked retail I never, ever thought about my rights. I went straight from being afraid of pissing off my parents and teachers to being afraid of pissing off my managers; shy, eager-to-please young women are a very valuable commodity for customer service jobs, it turns out. I still remember calling my manager to ask about my on-call shifts and listening to her consider whether to bring me in, knowing she was scanning the line for the change rooms, the line for the cash register, the coverage at the front of the store versus the back of the store, boxes to be opened in the basement, before coming back with a response about what I, waiting patiently, would do that day. There was one day where I know I was hoping not to be called in because the season finale of America’s Next Top Model was airing that night (lol) and another day where I was dying to be called in because I was extremely sad about A Boy and wanted a distraction (double lol). As always with that kind of magical thinking, I missed ANTM and had to sit at home with my own self-loathing, respectively.

Over the weekend I told a few friends a story about one of my favorite high school teachers, a really nice man who I should maybe track down so I can tell him how much he meant to me!! I was in his class one afternoon whispering to a friend of mine about a new job I had started at a smaller boutique. The manager insisted on twelve-hour shifts on Saturdays with only one fifteen-minute break, no sitting allowed, and the night before he had locked the doors and forced us to line up so he could inspect our coats, backpacks, and shoes while the exhausted keyholder counted and re-counted the cash register deposit, searching for a missing seventy-five cents. I got home at 2 a.m. that night — the store closed at 6 p.m. — and lay awake thinking about what his face looked like when he yelled at us.

I was telling my friend this story when my teacher tapped me on the shoulder and gestured for me to follow him outside. I hadn’t realized he was listening — we were supposed to be working on group projects so the class was loud with all those teens chattering — and I thought I was in trouble for ignoring the assignment. He took me to his office and sat me down and pushed the phone towards me. “What’s your manager’s number?” he asked, and I answered, not really understanding what was happening. He punched in the numbers and handed me the receiver. “You’re quitting,” he said.

I did! There was a lot of handwringing internally, but having a stern nice man staring at me helped, and I stumbled through it and hung up feeling both guilty and relieved. He took me to the soda machine and bought me a Coke. “Promise me you’ll never let a boss treat you like that again,” he said, and I took the Coke and I promised.

I feel bad now, knowing I did, of course, let bosses treat me like that again. None were quite as bad, but they were well-versed in the kinds of indignities Sapna writes about: the constant, unrelenting reminders that you don’t really matter, that your time is never as precious as the company’s time (or the company’s bottom line), that you and the money you’re paid might be your rent and your life and the difference between eating or not eating but to your employer it’s an inconvenience that can be cut any time.

I’m very glad that the workers at this Victoria’s Secret are suing, and that this investigation in New York is starting, and hope both actions lead to measurable changes for the approximately 4.5 million Americans currently working retail.