Secure Scheduling
Secure Scheduling
Secure Scheduling
The Phenomenon
In the service sector, the days of standard 9-to-5 schedules, or even regular day or night shifts, are long gone. Instead, workers in the service sector today contend with schedules that are unstable and unpredictable, varying from week to week and even from day to day.
Until recently, however, researchers have lacked the right data to track the contours, causes, and consequences of schedule instability for workers and businesses.
Innovative data from The Shift Project reveal several dimensions of this schedule instability:
- Most service-sector workers receive little advanced notice of their schedules: 60% received less than two weeks’ of notice of their schedules.
- Schedules are also subject to change even after being published. Many workers deal with last-minute changes to the timing of their shift (57%), face shift cancellation (13%), or work an on-call shift (27%), in which they are asked to keep their schedules open in the event they are needed to work.
- Service sector jobs often provide insufficient and irregular hours: 1 in 5 workers work part-time despite wanting more hours, and experience, on average, fluctuations of 34% in hours worked between the weeks where they work the most and the least in a month.
Figure 1. Prevalence of Schedule Instability in the U.S. Service Sector
From the perspective of workers, this is not desirable schedule flexibility, but rather unpredictability and instability imposed by employers: 65% of workers are required by their employer to keep their schedules “open and available” to work and 66% of workers would prefer a more predictable schedule.
Unequal Schedules
Although exposure to unstable and unpredictable schedules is high for all groups of workers, it is also fundamentally unequal. Workers of color, and particularly women of color, experience the most schedule instability. Much of this inequality stems from the concentration of workers of color at low-road companies.
Figure 2. Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Exposure to Schedule Instability
Many factors have contributed to this widespread schedule instability. Employers have tried to reduce their payroll costs as much as possible to maximize value for their shareholders, offering few benefits and maintaining a large reserve workforce of under-employed workers in a high-turnover sector.
There has also been a “risk shift” from employers to their employees, as firms use “just-in-time” scheduling practices (e.g., little advanced notice on shifts) to match employee staffing to customer demand
More recently, firms have adopted algorithmic approaches to scheduling, using artificial intelligence to create schedules that optimize firms’ bottom lines at the expense of schedule predictability for their workers.
The Consequences
These unstable scheduling practices have serious negative consequences for workers and businesses.
Job Dissatisfaction
Workers with unpredictable schedules experience higher job dissatisfaction and are more likely to say they will leave their jobs, including both younger workers and older workers.
Figure 3. Young Workers’ Feelings About Their Jobs as a Function of Schedule Instability
The Shift Project data. Cited from: Tyler Woods, Dylan Nguyen, Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett, “Labor market pathways to job quality mobility in the service sector: Evidence from the “Great Resignation”. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility,
Volume 92, 2024.
Job Turnover
Schedule instability can also lead to increased job turnover, driven by both job satisfaction and work-family conflict.
Figure 4. Job Turnover by Scheduling Condition
Economic Insecurity
Exposure to schedule instability likewise has consequences for workers’ economic security, as workers with more unstable schedules experience greater material hardship and take on more high-cost debt.
Figure 5. Hardship Experience by Amount of Schedule Instability (0 to 4 types)
Health and Well-Being
Workers with unstable and unpredictable work schedules also experience diminished health and well-being across numerous measures, including poorer sleep, increased psychological distress, and greater unhappiness.
Parents and Children
Finally, there are negative consequences of schedule instability for parents and children. Just-in-time work schedules have consequences for children’s care arrangements, leading to a greater number of care arrangements and increased reliance on informal care. Working parents in the service sector, especially those with more unpredictable schedules, often engage in a child-care scramble, piecing care arrangements together on an ad hoc basis.
In addition to difficulty arranging care, schedule instability is significantly associated with increased parental stress and work-life conflict. Parental exposure to schedule instability has negative consequences for child well-being, including poorer child sleep quality and behavioral problems in children.
The Solutions
While there is no easy or one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of schedule instability, there are several potential pathways toward addressing this phenomenon.
Labor Market
One approach is to hope the labor market will fix it. Under tight labor market conditions, firms may consider offering more stable schedules to attract or retain workers.
However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was little improvement in schedule instability in the service sector, despite the low unemployment rate (Figure 1). While some workers who left their jobs during the “Great Resignation” saw some improvement in schedule stability, overall rates of mobility were quite low. As Daniel Schneider described in a New York Times article on the topic, one potential explanation for this lack of progress is that firms were hesitant to make changes to scheduling practices that they couldn’t later claw black after the pandemic.
Figure 6. Scheduling Characteristics by Survey Wave
Company Changes
Another approach is for firms to take the “high road” by offering jobs with more stable and predictable schedules.
Just as unstable and unpredictable schedules reduce job satisfaction and lead to turnover, stable and predictable schedules may be good for business. Shift Project co-director Kristen Harknett was recently interviewed for Marketplace about how schedule predictability can be good for workers and good for business, as workers with more stable schedules are more loyal and less likely to look for a new job, ultimately reducing turnover costs.
One pathway that high-road firms can take to improve workers’ schedule stability is through technology. Workforce scheduling products can be designed to give workers more control and predictability in their schedules, rather than as algorithms that maximize the firm’s bottom line at workers’ expense.
IKEA recently implemented a technological intervention that will be evaluated by The Shift Project. IKEA introduced four new features in their scheduling software that gave IKEA “co-workers” more flexibility and control, including the ability to update availability, greater control over shift swapping, the option to pick up open shifts, and the ability to request shift coverage.
Service sector employers can and do make different choices regarding working conditions, and treating workers well can be good for business. For example, comparing Costco and Dollar General in the general merchandise industry, 85% of Costco workers receive at least two weeks of advanced notice on their work schedules, compared to only 27% of Dollar General workers.
Figure 7. Schedule Predictability and Job Satisfaction
This variation in schedule stability can have real impacts on businesses: workers are far more satisfied with their jobs at Costco (55%) than at Dollar General (19%). Beyond this case study, we broadly see wide variation across firms in their approach to schedules, including whether they provide at least two weeks of advanced notice on schedules to employees.
Figure 8. Company Variation in Scheduling – Less Than Two Weeks Notice
But these data also show clearly that while “high road” approaches are possible, they are far from universal. There is little evidence that we can count on all firms to simply voluntarily take the “high road” when it comes to scheduling practices.
Scheduling Laws
The reality is that to improve schedule quality for all workers, we must reevaluate our outdated wage and hour laws for the reality of work schedules in the 21st century. Localities, states, and ultimately the Federal Government can “raise the floor” on schedule quality through new labor standards.
The Shift Project has played a key role informing evidence-based policymaking on secure scheduling. Through a series of place-focused research briefs, The Shift Project has documented the reality of work scheduling for hourly service sector workers in Boston, Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Washington State.
Fair Work Week laws have now been implemented in cities such as Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as in the state of Oregon.
Jurisdictions with Secure Scheduling Laws
- Fair workweek standards are designed to address rampant unpredictability and instability in work schedules. These standards:
- Entitle workers to at least two weeks’ advanced notice of their work schedules and for compensation when their schedules are assigned, changed, or cancelled on short notice
- Recognize a workers’ need for rest and entitle workers to extra compensation when they are asked to work back-to-back closing then opening shifts.
- To address involuntary part-time employment, fair workweek legislation also stipulates that part-time workers be offered extra hours before additional workers are hired.
Case Study: Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance
The Shift Project team evaluated the effects of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance (SSO), which covers hourly workers at retail and food service establishments with 500 or more employees worldwide and at full-service restaurants with at least 500 employees and at least 40 locations worldwide. The SSO required that firms provide at least 14 days of advanced notice on work schedules to their employees.
Shift research suggests that the SSO increased the share of workers who know their schedules at least 14 days in advance and decreased the share of workers reporting last-minute shift timing changes without pay. Furthermore, using the implementation of Seattle’s SSO as a natural experiment, Shift researchers provided causal evidence that uncertainty about work time has harmful effects on worker happiness, sleep quality, and material hardship.
Figure 9. Impacts of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance on Work Schedule
The Shift Project Data. Cited from: Kristen Harknett, Daniel Schneider, and Véronique Irwin. 2021. “Improving Health and Economic Security by Reducing Work Schedule Uncertainty.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(41).
(A) Impacts of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling ordinance on work schedule unpredictability scale (0 to 6). (B) Impacts of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling ordinance on work schedules. Baseline values are set at zero. Y1 and Y2 values are the difference-in-differences estimates, which represent changes relative to baseline for Seattle and comparison workers. Estimates are regression-adjusted to control for demographics (age, race/ethnicity, sex, educational attainment, school enrollment, marital status, parental status) and work characteristics (managerial status, job tenure and industry subsector). The 95% confidence intervals are indicated by blue shading for Seattle workers and red shading for comparison workers. Dashed vertical line indicates when the Secure Scheduling ordinance went into effect.
The Shift Project Data. Cited from: Kristen Harknett, Daniel Schneider, and Véronique Irwin. 2021. <a href=”https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107828118″>“Improving Health and Economic Security by Reducing Work Schedule Uncertainty.”</a> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(41).
Although secure scheduling legislation has been limited to the state and local level, research from The Shift Project likewise informs potential federal action on the issue. Recently, the federal “Schedules that Work” and “Part-Time Workers’ Bill of Rights” were reintroduced in the Senate and the House, sponsored by Sen. Warren (D-MA) and Rep. DeLauro (D-CT). The sponsors drew directly on Shift Project research in motivating the need for this legislation, and our findings are cited at length in the “Findings” section of H.R.6670 and S.3642.
H.R.6670, Congress.gov
We also continually worked to provide policymakers with insights into the Shift data and our research through briefings and events.
In October 2022, The Shift Project—represented by pre-doctoral fellow Evelyn Bellew—joined U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) at the Department of Labor for a panel discussion on schedule instability.
The Shift Project shared our findings at a research round-table convened by the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in December of 2021 and findings from the Shift Project were featured in the Surgeon General’s framework for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being.
The Shift Project were invited speakers at a virtual Congressional briefing organized by the Association of Population Centers in September of 2022.
The Shift Project was featured in a workshop on “Economic Vulnerability, Work Across the Life Course, and Health” organized by Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging in September of 2022.
