How unpredictable work strains family and community life
A Q&A with Harvard sociologist and Shift Project director, Danny Schneider
Danny Schneider is a professor and researcher at Harvard focused on social demography, inequality, and the family. Danny is also the Co-Director of The Shift Project, which collects survey data on scheduling practices and well-being from thousands of hourly workers employed at 150 of the country’s largest service sector firms. His research with Shift has been instrumental in advancing many state and local level policies on “fair workweeks” and paid family leave.
Danny was my advisor at Harvard, and I spent many office hours with him asking questions about how precarious work and unpredictable schedules influence the social capital formation of workers. What is the nature of precarious work? How does it affect workers’ ability to form relationships at work? How does it influence the time workers can spend with their families? How does it impact their ability to participate in their communities?
These exchanges were extremely generative in shaping my understanding of the relationship between unstable work and family and community life, yet I’ve encountered very little research or media coverage on these topics since. So, we decided to record our most recent conversation, and we’re inviting you into office hours in this week’s Connective Tissue newsletter.
- Sam
PS: You can stay up to date with Danny’s research by following his Twitter, and you can learn more about The Shift Project by visiting their website.
What is the nature of “precarious” work?
Precarious work has two different dimensions. One is about the stability and continuity of the employment relationship. If we think of a canonical “good job,” it's one where you're a regular employee, you work at one firm for a long time, and you have internal career ladders so you can advance. In one vision, precarious jobs are then those that lack those characteristics. They are jobs that are shorter in duration, have more turnover, and don't follow a standard employment relationship (e.g., contractor, consultant, gig worker). All of that picks up on this dimension of precarity — that is, more uncertain and unpredictable work.
The other dimension of precarity is about working conditions. When you think back to that canonical “good job,” it paid a family wage, provided a pension, came with health insurance benefits, and had a regular schedule. That, too, has changed. Instead, we have jobs today where median wages have not risen substantially in decades (until very recently). We have seen a shift away from jobs with pensions and toward jobs with no retirement savings programs — or with retirement savings programs that ask workers to invest directly in the market and bear those risks. And we have seen a shift toward much more precarious working conditions more broadly — a lack of paid time off, unstable and unpredictable schedules — and these, too, are sources of precarity, instability, and uncertainty from the perspective of workers.
What type of workers tend to be most affected by this precarious work?
The story of precarity is somewhat different from the standard story about inequality. Precarity has become more widespread for many different kinds of workers. It was a broad phenomenon: we saw large-scale managerial layoffs and a move away from pensions for all types of workers. This sea-change, what the political scientist Jacob Hacker has called a “Risk Shift” from government and firms to workers, has affected all of us quite broadly. But the story of precarity is also a story of polarization. Workers at the top — highly paid professionals and the like — still maintain good job conditions today. But, for workers at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution — workers in non-professional healthcare positions, workers in logistics and transportation, workers in the large service sector — we have seen an increase in precarious working conditions. These are often workers who have lower levels of educational attainment. But these are also jobs that are everywhere in America and are essential. If we think about home health care aides and grocery store workers, these workers are providing the basics of what we as a society need to function.
Part of your day job involves directing The Shift Project at Harvard. Why did you start it in the first place?
The Shift Project derives from the proposition that work is foundational to our health and wellbeing and that, when the conditions are right, can be a fundamental source of purpose and dignity in our lives.
I came to the study of work and wellbeing as a family demographer, along with my close colleague and collaborator Kristen Harknett. We had started collaborating in the late 2000s on projects exploring how the Great Recession was affecting American families, working alongside our advisor, the late great Sara McClanahan — who is famous for her work on child wellbeing and changing family structures in America. Through that work, Kristen and I became interested in the idea of uncertainty — it seemed like the characteristic of the modern American economy for many workers, and something that could fundamentally shape these core family processes that matter for quality of life, economic security and wellbeing, and even intergenerational mobility.
We realized that this kind of uncertainty wasn't just a phenomenon that came around recessions, but something that many workers experienced every day in their work lives. By talking with workers, firms, advocates, and regulators, we came to understand that many workers lived with predictable uncertainty. Workers, particularly in the service sector and hourly jobs, had an uncertainty of time — they just didn't have a stable and predictable work schedule. The days of a nine-to-five shift, or even an overnight shift or a regular first shift, were long gone for workers in this sector. Instead, what we heard was that these workers were experiencing work schedules that were unstable and unpredictable — schedules that varied from day to day and week to week, where they got little advanced notice of what schedules they were going to work, but might get called in at the last minute if business was busier than expected or sent home if things were slow. It struck us, as people who had studied family processes and family wellbeing, that it would be extremely difficult for workers to structure meaningful lives with this everyday uncertainty over their time.
How does The Shift Project actually work?
As we began to focus on work scheduling, we realized that there was really a gap in existing data, with little that captured this instability and unpredictability in scheduling. So we set out to fill this gap. With The Shift Project, we’ve built a novel survey infrastructure where we go out and hear directly from workers employed at about 150 of the country’s largest service sector firms. These are the Walmarts and the Starbucks and the Amazons of the world. We ask workers about their working lives, their family lives, and their wellbeing. In two repeated cross-sectional surveys a year — once in the fall and once in the spring — we ask workers at these large firms how much they're paid, what kind of paid sick leave they get, and, in great detail, what their schedules look like. How much advance notice do they get? How often are they asked to come in on short notice? How often is a shift canceled at the last minute? Then we also ask them a lot about their economic wellbeing, material hardships they may have experienced, and their family lives. How are their kids faring? How do they arrange childcare? How much time do they have to spend with their children in activities, like helping their kids participate in local sports teams or art classes? A lot of our research has sought to connect these phenomena — to understand how this precarity of time and work schedules affects workers' economic security and wellbeing, and the wellbeing of their kids. We’ve collected 16 waves of survey data from these hourly workers, a sample of over 200,000 workers.
What are you learning from this research about how unstable and unpredictable work affects workers’ ability to spend time with their families, participate in their communities, and cultivate relationships?
The first thing to recognize is that this kind of instability is widespread in the sector. About two-thirds of workers get less than two weeks' notice of their work schedules. About 20 percent of workers have experienced on-call shifts. Workers frequently have shifts canceled at the last minute. Two-thirds of workers have had at least one last-minute timing change to their schedule. So this predictable uncertainty is a reality of life for these workers.
At a fundamental level, this arrhythmia makes it very difficult for workers to make commitments in their personal lives and to uphold regular obligations and routines. This uncertainty is also enormously stressful and taxing in a way that significantly reduces bandwidth. I’ll give you one example of how some of this plays out. We’ve written a lot about how parental exposure to unstable and unpredictable scheduling affects kids. We find that comparing among the children of hourly service sector workers, those whose parents have more unstable and unpredictable schedules end up in more fractured and informal childcare arrangements. Parents report being able to spend less time with their kids helping with homework or having family meals when they have more unstable schedules. All of this matters for child wellbeing. What’s really stark here is that we can well imagine that parents’ first commitments are to their kids. So, if we see these negative consequences for parenting, then that should warn us that exposure to such scheduling practices are likely to have even more pronounced effects on workers’ ability to engage with their communities and cultivate other relationships.
Can you speak a little bit more to that last point? So, it’s Saturday and I want to go to synagogue — or it’s Sunday and I want to go to church — how can I commit to doing so if I have an unpredictable schedule? Or, I want to volunteer in my community, but that requires consistently showing up on Thursday nights or Saturday mornings. How can I make this commitment? These schedules would seem to make community involvement very difficult.
It’s a great point. These kinds of precarious practices — maybe more than low wages, maybe more than lacking a retirement savings plan — undermine the ability to form meaningful connections in your community. They undermine your ability to engage with nonwork organizations, whether those be schools or childcare centers or houses of worship or community organizations. These kinds of scheduling practices are really greedy — they take all the control out of your life — and it’s this control that is exactly what you need so that you can give in a more communal way to other things.
But it's not something we've been able to test empirically. There's very little measurement of these kinds of scheduling practices in our standard data sets. At Shift, we haven’t yet had the chance to develop robust measures of social capital, look at them alongside scheduling practices for workers, and understand how these two may go together. I’d like to understand what kinds of workplace practices may be prosocial and help workers build those meaningful connections.
Just to pull on that thread a little bit further, what role can Shift or other researchers play in plugging this gap in the research?
There are two steps here. One is thinking carefully about the outcomes we want to measure, and we have good science on how to measure things like religious service attendance and organizational participation. A lot of what we do with survey work is find the best measures and bring them in. From there, because we run the surveys ourselves, we have the power to put these measures out in the world. We often run topical modules and we're always looking to understand the pressing issues that stakeholders want to learn more about — such as social capital, for example. Then we would want to ask, “How can we figure out how schedules matter for outcomes like social capital, if we were able to collect that data?”
By looking at workers in similar occupations in similar places in the country — but using the variation in scheduling practices — we can get a first-order sense, for example, of how having three weeks' notice versus one week's notice is associated with these measures of social participation. But it's also the case that companies vary in their scheduling practices, and that’s interesting in a lot of different ways. It's not that everyone must, by economic imperative, have the most unstable and unpredictable scheduling. Instead, we see variation between firms like Costco and Target, or between In-N-Out-Burger and McDonald's. This variation is powerful for understanding how adopting these higher road scheduling practices, which many businesses pursue, can matter for workers’ personal lives.
We’ve been talking a lot about quantitative measures of precarious work and social capital. But, I’m curious — what are you learning through your qualitative research? What are you hearing when you talk to workers directly?
The relationships we form at work also really matter. While the workers we survey are often in precarious and difficult jobs, they also find enormous meaning in this work — and some of that meaning comes from the family of coworkers they are embedded in. Unfortunately, these scheduling practices are bad for forming relationships in the workplace: you end up working with different people at different times, and it is difficult to form consistent, durable workplace bonds.
The other thing we've seen in our qualitative work is this paradox, where, to sustain a job that requires you to always be available to work and doesn’t have predictable hours, you need to rely on an informal social network. This could be somebody you can call to come watch your kid, someone to give you a ride when the bus isn't running at that time, or someone to loan you some money when you didn't get scheduled for many hours next week. In this way, the social networks people have are a private subsidy to companies. They are taxing not just workers with difficult conditions, they are taxing whole communities and families to make it possible for these workers to work these jobs. But the other side of this paradox is that, in drawing on their social support networks in this way, workers use up a lot of social capital. It’s really costly to have to keep asking someone to pick you up when your shift ends unexpectedly late, or to keep asking someone to pick up your kid from the school bus because you end up needing to be at work.
In this way, these jobs are also sapping the social capital that workers already have — that doesn't even get into the ability of workers to commit to being a member of a community or religious group. Not only is there the mechanical problem where you can't commit to be somewhere at a certain time when your greedy workplace (in terms of time) needs you anytime they want, but there is also a mental tax of living with that temporal uncertainty. Not knowing how much or when you're going to work is a cognitive load — in the way that behavioral scientists talk about the cognitive load of poverty, here we see the cognitive load of temporal poverty.
The policy solutions often proposed to curb precarious work — be they “fair workweek” policies, paid family leave, or sectoral bargaining — have largely been driven by progressives focused on advancing worker power and worker rights. But it strikes me that they could also appeal to conservatives, given the impact of unstable and unpredictable work on families, communities, and religious groups.
We have come to believe, through careful empirical work, that work schedule instability (alongside other dimensions of precarious work) is toxic to family life. I think we can ask for more stable and predictable practices based on a much broader social good: this is the right thing to do for workers, for their kids, and for their communities. Firms have a social responsibility to — if not actively foster family and community life — at least not tax it so heavily.
What does that look like? It is minimum labor standards. In the world of stable scheduling, the ask so far has not been that high: that workers get at least two weeks notice of their work schedule, and if their schedules are changed at the last minute, that workers receive some compensation for their time. It’s a recognition that just-in-time scheduling has costs for workers, their families, and their communities.
Why have these laws not been more broadly embraced? In some sense, it's because they get tagged as regulation — as another imposition on business. But that’s not the full picture: many firms do see the benefit of providing stable and predictable schedules because of the broader social benefits to workers and their families. Recognizing that these regulations are not being imposed to punish businesses, but rather to invest in families and communities — that’s an important shift of perspective.
It’s 2035 and unpredictable schedules are a thing of the past. What does family and community life look like for the service and retail workers who were most affected?
While there is an important role for policy and labor standards in reshaping work scheduling practices, I believe the sea change you imagine here would also flow from a renewal of the social contract between employers and workers. This change would have firms re-commit to a set of values that embraces worker wellbeing, community stewardship, and the public good alongside returns to shareholders. In such a world, workers would regain an equilibrium between work and family and community life, one in which work can be planned around life rather than life always taking a backseat to the shifting demands of the work schedule.
Fascinating how precarity works as a solvent of social capital--it erodes human connection. As well as one's mental balance!