“We’ve seen job quality degrade over the past 50 years in lots of ways. We often actually talk about it in terms of pay, how the minimum wage at the federal level has been stagnant, how employer-provided benefits have eroded, particularly for low-income workers. Here we see another aspect of that kind of loss of job quality.” Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett set the stage for the #FairWorkweek fight in this KQED Forum radio interview.
Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett discuss the impact of unstable and unpredictable schedules on workers' health and well-being in this Washington Post opinion piece. Schneider and Harknett's research using the Shift data shows that time matters even more than money, and they assert here that, for workers’ lives to be manageable, employers need to make work predictable.
"The rallying cry for millions of fast food and retail workers is $15 an hour. But, low pay isn’t the only occupational hazard that baristas, servers, and cashiers face. These workers also contend with work schedules that are unstable and unpredictable." Shift Co-Directors Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett wrote this blog piece for the American Sociological Association's Work in Progress.
Shift Co-Director Kristen Harknett was interviewed for UCSF's Science of Caring. Kristen discussed The Shift Project's mission to build a large-scale dataset that allows researchers to better understand the impact of unstable work schedules on families.
Research by Shift co-directors Danny Schneider and Kristen Harknett was featured in a Fast Company piece on scheduling. The article draws on a recent paper, "Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being," which explored associations between work schedules and sleep quality, distress, and overall happiness.
Drawing on Schneider and Harknett's new paper, "Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being," this MarketWatch piece discusses the scheduling challenges faced by retail sector workers. "The bar is already so low for retail workers when it comes to how their schedules are designed," writes reporter Jacob Passy, "that something as simple as not having a shift cancelled can make a huge difference."
The Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Alix Gould-Werth wrote this blog piece summarizing key findings in Schneider and Harknett's paper, "Consequences of Routine Work-Scheduling Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being."
New research from The Shift Project explores the relationship between service sector work scheduling practices and worker health and wellbeing. In a recent paper, Shift researchers document significant temporal precarity in retail and food service industries across the country, and find that this form of precarity is a strong predictor of worker health – stronger, in fact, than wages. The paper's findings are highlighted in the latest Shift research brief.
"Focusing on wages and employment misses a large part of what makes for a good job and a good life: control over one’s time." Shift co-directors Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett wrote this opinion piece for The Hill to coincide with the release of their new paper, "Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being," published in the American Sociological Review.
With post-holiday workforce reduction in full swing, thousands of retail workers face layoffs in a sector already plagued by temporal precarity. Shift co-directors Danny Schneider and Kristen Harknett discuss the economic and psychological hardships associated with unstable and unpredictable work schedules.
