On October 27th, 2025, the Shift Project community gathered for the second monthly meeting of the fall semester to learn about Hyojin Cho’s research on employees’ experiences with Fair Workweek ordinances.
Guest Speaker
Hyojin Cho is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Bringing an organizational and policy lens to the study of job quality, her research examines how employer/manager practices and labor standards interact to shape employment conditions and, in turn, the social and economic well-being of workers and households. She focuses on jobs in the service industry, which affect many low-paid workers and their families, as well as jobs in the human services sector. She has been part of research projects (PIs: Susan Lambert and Julia Henly) examining frontline managers’ practices in implementing Fair Workweek (FWW) laws and employees’ experiences under these laws. Her current work investigates how business ownership structures (franchise vs. corporate-owned) influence managers’ practices of implementing FWW laws.
Presentation
U.S. municipalities are serving as incubators for new labor standards. Fair workweek (FWW) laws, designed to protect low-paid workers from employers’ problematic scheduling practices, exemplifythis trend. To date, ten municipalities, including Chicago, New York City, and Seattle, have enacted multi-provision FWW laws. Evaluating the impact of municipal-level labor standards on employees’ scheduling experiences presents two difficult challenges. The first challenge is creating meaningful comparison groups: workers who work in a job covered by a FWW law and workers who work in a job that would be covered were it located in a covered municipality. The second challenge arises from variation in administrative rules across municipalities that shape how FWW laws are implemented. For example, all municipalities include unique rules that allow employers in their area to avoid extra payment to employees for schedule changes.
We analyze online survey data from 1,781 retail and food service workers in Chicago, NYC, and Seattle collected via Qualtrics panels. We employ an innovative approach to locating worksites by having respondents select their place of work on a Google map embedded in the survey, producing a geo-location for analysis. Additionally, survey questions are customized to reflect variations in administrative rules across the three municipalities. We estimate the effects of FWW laws on workers’ experiences of scheduling practices targeted by the laws (e.g., advance notice, extra pay) and variation by provision, administrative rules, and industry. Our study aims to provide methodological insights for assessing municipal-level labor standards and policy insights into how the design of FWW laws shapes their effectiveness in improving workers’ schedules.
