“A Fair Work Week: Raising the Floor on Precarious Scheduling,” Daniel Schneider, Harvard

POPULATION STUDIES WORKSHOP

Abstract: For many, work is a powerful source of meaning and belonging as well as economic sufficiency. While good jobs can facilitate worker and family health and economic security, large shares of the American workforce appear to contend with jobs that are precarious. However, our ability to describe and understand the contours and consequences of that precarity have been limited by existing data.  We introduce novel data from The Shift Project, which has collected rich survey data on job quality alongside measures of economic security and wellbeing from over 200,000 hourly workers employed in the service sector. We show that, in particular, unstable and unpredictable work schedules are widespread and pose challenges to economic security and health and wellbeing for workers and their families.  We then exploit the employer-employee linked structure of the Shift data and targeted geographic over-samples to assess the potential for firms to take a “high road” approach to work scheduling and the efficacy of local labor standards that “raise the floor” on scheduling.

Daniel Schneider is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Sociology in FAS at Harvard University.  He is co-director of The Shift Project. His research is at the intersection of inequality, labor, social demography, and social policy. His current work examines the contours and consequences of precarious working conditions and leverages novel survey data and stakeholder partnerships to understand how labor standards and high-road company practices can improve working conditions, economic security, and the wellbeing of workers and their families.

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