Time is emerging as the critical labor issue of our day: there is a growing crisis of employees required to work unequal, unpredictable and uncontrollable hours. They’re being asked to go home early without pay, stay late or work weekends, and they’re getting berated or fired for taking sick days.
The unpredictability is growing, both because of changes in the economy and changes in families. Company policies contribute to unemployment by requiring overwork, and organizations staff so lean that any absence generates problems – leading to more unpredictability for employees. Flexibility, which many hoped would result in jobs that were more responsive to employees’ lives, increasingly means that workers have to re-arrange their lives to meet employers’ last-minute demands.
While conducting research for our forthcoming book, we heard from hundreds of people about the impact of unpredictability: low-wage workers struggle to get enough hours in a week to pay the rent; they rarely know far in advance what days or hours they will be working because their schedules are subject to change; and they’re often told, unexpectedly, to work a dreaded weekend or night shift and have to hope that their kids will be fine alone, or can stay with a friend or relative.
The stereotype is that schedule unpredictability mostly affects young retail and food service workers. But studies show that about 69% of low-wage earners live in households with an annual income of less than $50,000 (indicating they are neither young people living at home, or spouses of higher-wage earners), and that low-wage jobs of all types – particularly in the fast-growing service industry – require unpredictable hours without much, if any, concomitant increase in wages.
For instance, to make ends meet, low-wage nursing assistants – who have relatively stable jobs – must often take unexpected shifts, work while sick or skip their vacations. As a nursing assistant told us:
If you got diarrhea or vomiting, they still want you to come in. At our meetings, they say a sore throat is not really a sore throat. Lots of times they won’t let you go home. The whole idea is to intimidate you so you won’t call out.
Another nursing assistant explained that, to get by, “I have to count on my two children” (ages nine and 11), even working the night shift because “what better time is there when they are sleeping?”
A nursing assistant who lives in a trailer told us that she skips vacation and works extra “so I know I have the oil for the coming winter”. Though she and her coworkers get six days a year of paid sick leave, she told us that they’re penalized each time they use one and that, if anyone were to call in sick four times in three months, she thinks she would be fired.
The rise of dual-earner families and the increase in the number of single-parent households means that one unpredicted schedule change causes a cascade of problems. For instance, when a father works the day shift and the mother works nights, if the father has to stay late, the mother gets to her job late, and whomever she is supposed to be relieving must also stay unexpectedly late.
And although schedule unpredictability creates more urgent problems for low-wage workers, the middle class isn’t unaffected: affluent professionals often struggle with employers’ expectations that they can, and will, stay late and that they will check and reply to email and text messages at all hours.
There is some understanding among lawmakers that unpredictable schedules are a significant labor issue that requires policy changes. Vermont and San Francisco have adopted laws allowing workers to request predictable schedules. In 2011, Connecticut became the first state with mandatory paid sick leave; this month, California will become the second, and, in November, Massachusetts voters will decide whether it becomes the third state to legislate paid sick days.
At the federal level, the Healthy Families Act – which has 133 House co-sponsors – would mandate paid sick days. In June, President Obama ordered federal agencies to give employees the “right to request” flexible hours.
But the US still has a long way to go before it fully recognizes that time itself is a labor issue – and, some would say, it is moving backwards in its thinking. We need a labor movement that focuses on time and moves beyond a piecemeal approach on issues – canceled shifts, overtime, underwork, vacations, sick days – to see them all as operating together to create chaos in people’s lives.