Hard Times: Routine Schedule Unpredictability and Material Hardship among Service Sector Workers

2020/07/07 by Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett · 58 citations
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Business #Demographic economics #Economics #Employment and Welfare Studies #Labour economics #Management #Marketing #Operations management #Retirement, Disability, and Employment #Schedule #Service (business) #Workplace Health and Well-being

paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaa079

published in Social Forces 99(4), 1682-1709 (Oxford University Press)

openalex publication_date 2020/07/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

American policymakers have long focused on work as a key means to improve economic wellbeing. Yet, work has become increasingly precarious and polarized. This precarity is manifest in low wages, but also in unstable and unpredictable work schedules that often vary significantly week-to-week with little advance notice. We draw on new survey data from The Shift Project on 37,263 hourly retail and food service workers in the United States. We assess the association between routine unpredictability in work schedules and household material hardship. Using both cross-sectional models and panel models, we find that workers who receive shorter advanced notice, those who work on-call, those who experience last minute shift cancellation and timing changes, and those with more volatile work hours are more likely to experience hunger, residential, medical, and utility hardships as well as more overall hardship. Just-in-time work schedules afford employers a great deal of flexibility, but at a heavy cost to workers' economic security.

Citations

• Passing the buck: Labor flexibility practices that transfer risk onto hourly workers
• Unpredictable Work Timing in Retail Jobs

Cited by

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• Positioning Stories: Accounting for Insecure Work
• Frequency of Workplace Controls and Associations With Safety Perceptions Among a National Sample of US Food Retail Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic. [europepmc]
• Maternal exposure to work schedule unpredictability and child behavior. [europepmc]
• Surviving in Crisis Mode: The Effect of Material Hardship and Social Support on Emotional Wellbeing Among People in Poverty During COVID-19. [europepmc]
• Mandates Narrow Gender Gaps In Paid Sick Leave Coverage For Low-Wage Workers In The US. [europepmc]
• Precarious Employment and Well-Being: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic. [europepmc]
• COVID-19 employment shocks and safety net expansion: Health effects on displaced workers. [europepmc]
• Parental Exposure to Work Schedule Instability and Child Sleep Quality. [europepmc]
• Temporal Autonomy: Schedule Instability as a Threat to Perceived Dignity in the U.S. Service Sector. [europepmc]
• Work Schedule Quality and the Production of Parental Stress and Parenting Time. [europepmc]

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• Counting Hours, Counting Losses: The Toll of Unpredictable Work Schedules on Financial Security
• Passing the buck: Labor flexibility practices that transfer risk onto hourly workers
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