Men’s and women’s economic resources are important determinants of marriage timing. Prior demographic and sociological literature has often measured resources in narrow terms, considering employment and earnings and not more fine-grained measures of job quality. Yet, scholarship on work and inequality focuses squarely on declining job quality and rising precarity in employment and suggests that this transformation may matter for the life course. Addressing the disconnect between these two important areas of research, this study analyzes data on the 1980–1984 U.S. birth cohort from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to examine the relationships between men’s and women’s job...
Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with parents employed in the service sector in the San Francisco Bay area, we find that meeting the demands of work and parenting almost invariably involved reliance on informal child care. We unpack the relationship between work schedules and specific constellations of informal child care. We show that the stability and predictability of work schedules shaped child-care arrangements. Working parents with stable, although frequently nonstandard, schedules often managed child care using a tag team parenting approach. Those with unstable schedules often engaged in a child-care scramble, in which care arrangements were pieced together on an...
In January 2022, the California State Assembly voted in support of a first-of its-kind labor bill, known as the Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act (FAST Recovery Act). The FAST Act establishes an independent council to set industry-wide labor standards on wages, hours, schedules, and other working conditions relating to health and safety for Fast Food workers in the state. The bill also makes businesses jointly liable for any labor violations among their franchisees. The standards set by this council would have widespread impacts, affecting around half-a-million workers in the state.
A survey of gig workers in the spring of 2020 revealed that their jobs provided poor working conditions, even relative to other service-sector workers, who themselves typically receive low pay.
Low wages are widespread in the service-sector – a sector that makes up nearly 20% of the nation’s workforce. While the COVID-19 crisis has focused public and policy attention on the service-sector, workers in retail, food service, big box stores, pharmacy, hardware, delivery, grocery and other subsectors continue to labor under precarious working conditions. Workers struggle with a lack of paid sick leave, unstable and unpredictable work schedules, and low wages.
Nearly 250,000 workers are employed in the retail and food service sector in the state of Connecticut.1 Nationally, jobs in the service sector are characterized by low pay and few fringe benefits, and workers employed in the service sector have little control over the days and times that they will work.2 In addition, many service sector employers across the country rely on just-in-time and on-call scheduling practices designed to minimize labor costs by closely aligning staffing with consumer demand.3 These practices can introduce a great deal of instability into the lives of workers and their families.4
Service sector jobs in the United States are characterized by low pay, few fringe benefits, and limited employee control over scheduled workdays and times. Many service sector employers across the country rely on just-in-time and on-call scheduling practices designed to minimize labor costs by closely aligning staffing with consumer demand. These practices can introduce significant instability into the lives of workers and their families.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought public awareness to the vital role that front-line service sector workers play in our economy and daily lives. These workers did the essential and in-person work of staffing grocery stores and pharmacies, keeping restaurants and retail running, and delivering supplies while millions of other Americans sheltered in place and worked from home. The service sector makes up a large sector of the U.S. labor force, accounting for over 23 million jobs. Despite their importance during the pandemic, jobs in this sector are profoundly precarious, undermining both the economic security and the health and wellbeing of workers...
Using the most recent shift data, this brief explores how vaccination among service sector workers has changed since the Spring. Vaccination rates have increased to 68% as of Nov 2021. These rates were even higher for employees that were incentivized to get vaccinated by their employer. However, the survey data show that hesitancy and resistance emerge now as the primary barriers to vaccination among the unvaccinated.
For many young workers, the service sector is the site where they begin their careers. The service sector comprises 17 percent of jobs in the U.S. economy, and 35 percent of the jobs occupied by those under the age of 25 (BLS, 2018). Young workers in the service sector typically receive low wages and few fringe benefits, and also contend with erratic work schedules, with hours and shifts that change day to day and week to week with little advance notice. These workers rarely have much input into the timing and amount of their scheduled work hours. These conditions may...
