We consider the problem of scheduling n jobs with sequence-dependent processing times on a set of parallel-identical machines. The processing time of each job consists of a pure processing time and a sequence-dependent setup time. The objective is to maximize the total remaining machine available time which can be used for other tasks. For the problem, a hybrid genetic algorithm is proposed. The algorithm combines a genetic algorithm for global search and a heuristic for local optimization to improve the speed of evolution convergence. The genetic operators are developed such that parallel machines can be handled in an efficient and effective way. For local optimization, the adjacent pairwise interchange method is used. The proposed hybrid genetic algorithm is compared with two heuristics, the nearest setup time method and the maximum penalty method. Computational results for a series of randomly generated problems demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the two heuristics.