Precarious work in the United States is defined by economic and temporal dimensions. A large literature documents the extent of low wages and limited fringe benefits, but research has only recently examined the prevalence and consequences of unstable and unpredictable work schedules. Yet practices such as on-call shifts, last minute cancellations, and insufficient work hours are common in the retail and food-service sectors.
American policymakers have long focused on work as a key means to improve economic wellbeing. Yet, work has become increasingly precarious and polarized. This precarity is manifest in low wages but also in unstable and unpredictable work schedules that often vary significantly week to week with little advance notice. We draw on new survey data from The Shift Project on 37,263 hourly retail and food service workers in the United States. We assess the association between routine unpredictability in work schedules and household material hardship. Using both cross-sectional models and panel models, we find that workers who receive shorter advanced...
In this article, we explore the use of Facebook targeted advertisements for the collection of survey data. We illustrate the potential of survey sampling and recruitment on Facebook through the example of building a large employee–employer linked data set as part of The Shift Project. We describe the workflow process of targeting, creating, and purchasing survey recruitment advertisements on Facebook. We address concerns about sample selectivity and apply poststratification weighting techniques to adjust for differences between our sample and that of “gold standard” data sources. We then compare univariate and multivariate relationships in the Shift data against the Current Population...
Research on precarious work and its consequences overwhelmingly focuses on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low wages. But the rise in precarious work also involves a major shift in its temporal dimension, such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms to workers. A lack of suitable existing data, however, has precluded investigation of how precarious scheduling practices affect workers’ health and well-being. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of...
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
