By Daniel Schneider

Compliance and the Complaint Gap: Labor Standards Violations in the California Service Sector

This report aims to illuminate the state of compliance with California’s core labor standards and the opportunities and barriers to make them real for the majority of workers they cover.

Parental Exposure to Work Schedule Instability and Child Sleep Quality

This study investigates the relationship between parental exposure to unstable and unpredictable work schedules and child sleep quality.

IKEA Self-Scheduling Intervention: Baseline Report

In this report, we document the scheduling conditions for IKEA co-workers before the launch of the intervention, and describe the new self-scheduling features. Next, we describe the research design for the planned evaluation of the intervention. We end with discussions of future directions, including the future evaluation report that will describe implementation and the effects of the Self-Scheduling Intervention.

Most Hourly Workers at Large Service Sector Firms Still Lack Paid Sick Leave

Paid sick leave is essential for worker well-being and the public health, yet the United States does not have a federal law guaranteeing workers access to paid sick leave.

The Politics of Prevention: Polarization in How Workplace COVID-19 Safety Practices Shaped the Well-Being of Frontline Service Sector Workers

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reshaped the labor market, especially for service sector workers. Frontline service sector workers, already coping with precarious working conditions, faced proximate risks of COVID-19 transmission on the job and navigated new workplace safety measures, including masking, social distancing, and staying home while sick, all in a polarized political environment.

Racial/Ethnic and Gender Inequities in the Sufficiency of Paid Leave During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from the Service Sector

Access to paid family and medical leave (PFML), including leave to care for a seriously ill loved one or recover from one's own serious illness, conveys health and economic benefits for workers and their families.

Mitigating the Impacts of Sexual Harassment: Evidence from a National Survey of Retail and Restaurant Workers

Workplace sexual harassment and violence inflict a variety of costs on survivors, raising important questions about prevention: changing the conditions that give rise to the problem in the first place. So long as sexual harassment and violence persist, mitigating their impacts and creating clear channels for recourse will also remain crucial, shaping the wellbeing and agency of survivors in navigating a way forward.

Dreams Deferred: Downward Mobility and Making Ends Meet in the Service Sector

Nearly one-in-five jobs in the United State are in the service sector, including in retail, grocery, pharmacy, fast food, and fulfillment, but there are countervailing views on who works these jobs and to what end.

Why Are Young Workers Leaving Their Jobs?

The American labor market has experienced dramatic changes since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic in the early spring of 2020, with historic job losses followed by a sharp employment recovery.

Working in The Service Sector in Michigan

This research brief is part of a series designed to advance our understanding of working conditions in the service sector—in particular, schedule instability and unpredictability—in cities and states across the country.
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