Few Red Lobster workers have access to paid sick leave. As a result, most Red Lobster workers who get sick are forced to show up to work, according to interviews with Red Lobster employees and previously unreleased survey data.
Nearly two full years into the global COVID-19 pandemic, and in the middle of an Omicron surge, major U.S. companies are making moves to reduce paid leave for employees who test positive for COVID-19.
Posting work hours two weeks in advance helps retail and food service workers, many of whom are women of color with caregiving responsibilities, a study finds.
Kristen Harknett (@KristenHarknett), Professor of Sociology at the University of California San Francisco and co-director of The Shift Project (a large-scale survey and research study of low-wage workers in the service sector) joins us to discuss the so-called “Great Resignation.”
Over the past four decades, many workers in hourly front-line jobs in the retail and food service sectors have been subject to low pay and few basic benefits. More recently, those challenges have been compounded by an increase in what is termed “temporal precarity,” or the lack of a stable and predictable work schedule. Employers in these sectors increasingly implement “just-in-time scheduling,” which shifts risks away from the employer and onto the employees.
Schneider and Harknett spoke with Spotlight about their recent analysis of the Seattle Secure Scheduling Ordinance, which went into effect in 2017 as one of the nation’s first laws to regulate workers’ schedule predictability. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
