While essential workers have received a lot of acknowledgment for working through the COVID-19 pandemic, recent reports and surveys have found that these workers are facing many challenges concerning their health and financial situations. OSHA has allowed individual employers to set their own safety standards and protocols, leading to discrepancies.
In a recently published study in the American Sociological Review, The Shift Project finds that White workers in U.S. retail and food-service industries are less likely to have "on-call" shifts. The study also finds that having a manager of a different race factors in whether time off is granted and canceled shifts are avoided, older workers are less likely to be exposed to precarious schedules, and workers with more seniority receive more shifts.
The Shift Project's report on the job quality of California's service sector was commissioned by the Irvine Foundation to increase awareness about the impact that job scheduling and other aspects of job quality have on low-wage workers. The report notes the effects that unpredictable schedules have on daily life, time with family, quality sleep, and more.
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.
Violet Moya, a Texas resident, describes her spontaneous firing from Sephora and how, from her point of view, the incident exemplifies that Sephora never really cared about employees like her. She describes herself as one of the hourly service sector workers that wanted more hours, but instead was given unstable schedules and few benefits.
In a recently released Shift working paper, researchers find that workers of color, and particularly women of color, experience more unpredictable hours and last-minute scheduling changes than their white coworkers—this in an industry that disproportionately employs African American and Latinx workers. The paper, co-authored by Adam Storer, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett and the focus of this CNN article, attributes much of the scheduling gap between minority workers and white workers to managers' conscious or unconscious racial bias.
The Shift Project released a new report documenting the consequences of unstable and unpredictable work schedules for workers and their families. Researchers find that unstable and unpredictable schedules, which disproportionately impact workers of color, lead to a measurable increase in material hardship and have intergenerational consequences for the children of service-sector workers. These practices are also linked to higher rates of job turnover.
Many Americans are working, but poor. Along with low wages and few benefits, the working poor frequently find themselves up against erratic work schedules, with hours and shifts that change day-to-day and week-to-week with little advance notice.
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.
