Work is central to economic security, wellbeing, and mobility. But, work isn’t working for everyone. The Shift Project is a leading source of data and analysis to understand the reality of working conditions for the 25 million US workers employed in the service sector.
The Shift Project conducts critical research on the impacts of working conditions – from scheduling to paid leave to workplace surveillance – on the nearly 20% of the United States workforce employed in the service sector. Utilizing one-of-a-kind, in-house survey data collected from more than 200,000 hourly workers since 2016, we drive actionable insights into the causes, contours, and consequences of precarious work. Our work informs labor standards and firm policies that advance the holistic well-being of workers and their families.
Using a novel method of online sampling and recruitment, we field surveys to workers at over 150 of the largest firms in retail, food service, grocery, delivery and fulfillment, and hospitality. We provide unique measurement of the reality of working conditions, including work scheduling, access to paid leave, workplace surveillance, and labor standards violations.
We pair this in-depth measurement of job quality with detailed measures of financial security and of the health and wellbeing of workers and their families.
The Shift Project is co-led by Professors Kristen Harknett and Daniel Schneider. Our collaborative work brings together faculty across institutions, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, predoctoral fellows, and other committed partners.
Through rigorous research, we produce studies and reports that advance social science and inform public discourse and policy. Our data-driven findings have become a trusted resource for policymakers, advocates, and media outlets seeking to understand and improve the lives of workers and their families.
Shift Co-Directors, Schneider and Harknett have been working together to understand inequality, work, and wellbeing for almost 15 years. Their early research focused on mapping the effects of the Great Recession on American families, surfacing the key role that economic uncertainty related to unemployment and foreclosure risks played during the crisis.
That work evolved to focus on the everyday uncertainty that many workers faced in the service sector, not just due to low wages and unemployment, but largely because of significant work schedule volatility, instability, and unpredictability. Through in-depth interviews with working parents, Harknett and Schneider repeatedly heard how parents struggled to coordinate childcare around unpredictable and fluctuating work hours, how the volatility of weekly assigned hours made it impossible to rely on a steady income, and how the uncertainty of schedule timing imposed a heavy mental toll.
These qualitative data exposed a significant gap in standard social science data collection. Large scale surveys did not effectively capture these dynamics of unstable and unpredictable work scheduling. Traditional economic data was failing short of capturing the extent of this problem.
To fill the gap, Schneider and Harknett founded The Shift Project. Today, a decade later, The Shift Project has produced the nation’s largest dataset on work schedules, economic security, and well-being for hourly service workers in the U.S., gathering insights from over 200,000 workers across the country.
For more on how the project started, check out these press pieces featuring interviews with Harknett and Schneider detailing The Shift Project’s research journey: Brigid Schulte’s “Why Today’s Shopping Sucks” in Washington Monthly (March 2020), and Bryce Covert’s “Why Schedule Sanity is Workers’ New Fight for $15” in Fast Company (January 2023).