The Effects of Scheduling Regulation on Workers and Families

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

The courts and legislatures have played a large role in shaping today's workplaces, for example through minimum wages, anti-discrimination policy, and workplace safety requirements. Historically, legal standards also created the current U.S. norms around scheduling, including the 8-hour workday and the weekend. But in recent years, regulation of the labor market has focused little attention on scheduling, despite the fact that the nature of work schedules has been shifting dramatically. In particular, while the earlier generation of scheduling regulation concentrated on preventing employers from extracting too much labor from workers, many of today's workers fear instead too much variability and unpredictability in work and pay. Labor advocates have raised concerns about employers shifting the risk of variable customer demand from themselves to their employees, by giving workers neither hours nor pay when demand is unexpectedly low. Such risk-shifting, recent research has shown, can harm worker health and well-being. Given the demographic changes in both family structure and the low-wage workforce, many service workers today are single parents without other adults in the household on whom to rely, meaning that this risk-shifting may harm children as well. By examining a regulation that addresses work schedule unpredictability, this project will help identify the consequences of these new legislative interventions in the employer-employee relationship. This study will evaluate whether such regulations are feasible to implement and enforce, at a key time when many jurisdictions are considering similar untested legislation. The research project will evaluate a new labor law, the Fair Workweek Standard (FWS), which will go into effect January 1, 2020, in Philadelphia. The research team will gather daily data from 1,000 low-wage workers with a young child using an innovative survey tool. Data will be collected in two waves: prior to FWS implementation (fall 2019) and post-implementation (spring 2020). The team has designed a text-message survey tool to collect detailed daily reports about work schedule changes and worker and family well-being. The sample will be balanced across those working in: (1) retail, food and hospitality firms that meet threshold local and global employment levels and are subject to regulation from the FWS and 2) otherwise similar firms below those thresholds, which are exempt from the FWS. The project will answer three key research questions: (1) What is the impact of the Philadelphia FWS on working parents' schedule unpredictability? (2) What are the effects of schedule unpredictability on the well-being of low-wage workers and their families? (3) Are there any unintended effects of the legislation on working parents' hours, earnings, and employment? This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.