(Illustration by Adam McCauley) 

Since the 19th century, when the labor movement called for the introduction of the eight-hour workday, reformers have focused their energies on limiting the hours that employers can assign workers. Labor advocates have long believed that if Americans weren’t putting in too many hours, they’d be protected from exploitation. More recently, economists and social scientists have linked reduced hours to productivity gains and increased employee happiness. Some countries, experimenting with four-day workweeks and six-hour days, have reported myriad benefits.

But a new paper shows that when it comes to job quality and worker happiness, it’s not just the number of hours that matters. Adam Storer, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; Daniel Schneider, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Kristen Harknett, a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), examined precarious scheduling, a growing phenomenon in an increasingly service economy, and how racial inequality exacerbates it.

Precarious scheduling occurs when workers are on call without any definitive commitment of work and subject to last-minute schedule changes, sometimes up to the very minute before a shift is slated to begin. “Employers build forecasts to predict how many workers they might need to work at a certain time,” Storer says. “In the retail and food-service sectors, employers have tried to cut labor costs as much as possible by relying on ‘just-in-time’ scheduling practices. Some employers will cancel shifts without advance notice if it’s not as busy as predicted, or hire fewer workers for a shift, calling in people last minute if it turns out to be busier than expected.”

While firms and frontline managers enjoy broad discretion when it comes to scheduling practices, workers—lacking autonomy and predictability—are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to plan childcare, attend college classes, or meet other commitments. Storer, Schneider, and Harknett highlight how schedule instability and the temporal precarity it produces can be a source of profound stress and economic hardship and is detrimental to worker health and well-being.

The authors draw on novel data from the Shift Project, where Schneider and Harknett are codirectors. A joint initiative between the Harvard Kennedy School and UCSF, the Shift Project studies “the nature and consequences of precarious employment in the service sector,” with the goal of helping policy makers and firms improve job quality. The effort generates data about firms and managers, and by running Facebook ads targeting specific employers, it has enabled researchers to distinguish between practices at different firms. The ability to gauge whether Costco treats workers better than McDonald’s, for example, is especially valuable in the United States, where there is a dearth of firm-identified data.

“We know that white workers receive better pay, more benefits, and are looked at preferentially in hiring,” Storer says, “and there’s a pretty clear line from that research to understanding how scheduling might play a role.” Storer and his coauthors used a sample of more than 30,000 hourly workers at 123 of the country’s largest retail and food-service firms, and they found that when a manager is the same race as the employee, a better schedule results. Since the overwhelming majority of managers are white—80 percent of white workers have managers who are also white, compared with 30 percent for nonwhites—nonwhite employees are disadvantaged when it comes to the temporal dimensions of work: a stable, predictable schedule; having sufficient hours to make ends meet; successfully requesting time off; and fewer “clopens,” or consecutive closing then opening shifts. “There’s also preferential treatment occurring at the micro-interaction level,” Storer notes, “between a manager and the people they manage.”

“This study highlights the need to investigate nonwage elements of inequality and job quality,” Alex J. Wood, a sociologist at the University of Birmingham, says. For Wood, the study’s findings demonstrate “the need to challenge unjust hiring practices but also hierarchical and undemocratic work organization.” The authors look between firms and within firms, attributing racism in scheduling to discretionary managerial practices as well as firm-level dynamics. Nonwhite workers tend to be sorted into companies where unstable scheduling is more common, while white workers are more likely to work at companies where canceled shifts and clopens are the exception.

Probing the intersection of race and gender, the authors also discover that women of color experience more temporal precarity than any other group, and that disparities between racial groups are larger for women workers than men.

“It’s common to say race, class, and gender intersect,” Wood says, “but this research highlights some of the causal mechanisms by which this process actually takes place.”

Adam Storer, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett, “What Explains Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Job Quality in the Service Sector?” American Sociological Review, vol. 85, no. 4, 2020.

Read more stories by Daniela Blei.