Presidential hopeful Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled a fair workweek plan which would require at least two weeks' notice of schedules, compensation for last-minute changes, and greater access to paid leave and retirement benefits.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is bringing fair scheduling to the campaign trail. Warren's Schedules That Work Act, introduced last month, and her latest proposal, the Part-Time Workers Bill of Rights, aim to curtail just-in-time scheduling. Warren cited The Shift Project's research, including findings that 80% of retail and food-service workers had “little to no input” into their work schedules, and that one in four workers were required to remain available for “on-call” shifts.
Several cities and the state of Oregon have passed secure scheduling legislation so workers have more predictable schedules (and compensation when things are not predictable). Recently, the Schedules The Work Act was reintroduced to address just-in-time scheduling at a national scale. This article from Vox dives into the fair workweek movement and legislation backed by Shift data.
NEW JERSEY – The Star-Ledger Editorial Board endorsed State Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg's call for a fair workweek in New Jersey. In their editorial, the Board cited Shift's recent working papers examining the negative consequences of just-in-time scheduling for workers and their families.
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.
New Jersey – State Senator Loretta Weinberg presided over a Fair Workweek news conference on Wednesday highlighting the issue of unpredictable and unstable scheduling in the state of New Jersey. Shift's Daniel Schneider was an invited expert at the event, where he described the intergenerational impact of just-in-time scheduling. "One in 10 American children has a parent who works in retail or food service. ... Imagine trying to arrange for child care when you don’t know when you’ll work or how many hours."
The New York Times published exclusive coverage of five new working papers from The Shift Project. Our latest research investigates associations between schedule instability and unpredictability and material hardship, child care, child behavioral outcomes, and job turnover. Perhaps the most striking finding is that exposure to unstable schedules is stratified by race: workers of color, and particularly women of color, experience worse schedules than their white counterparts.
“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.
