Abusive scheduling practices in the retail industry are hurting workers, recent research by sociologists Daniel Schneider and Kristen Harknett shows. They surveyed workers at the 80 largest retail firms, finding that only 39 percent have regular schedules, with 16 percent getting less than three days’ notice of their schedules, 14 percent having had a shift canceled in the last month, a quarter being on-call for work that they might not actually get (a practice a California court recently ruled against), and half having to “clopen.”
Digging deeper than those bare statistics, Schneider and Harknett found that scheduling abuses make workers’ lives worse. It’s no surprise, but it’s important to look at in detail. Workers who had shifts canceled had a 65 percent chance of showing signs of psychological distress, compared with 45 percent for those who didn’t have shifts canceled. Workers who were clopening or on-call reported worse sleep than those who weren’t. Scheduling had even bigger effects on worker happiness than did getting a raise, according to this research.
The state of Oregon and a few cities have passed laws to improve scheduling practices—laws that should be models for other states under Democratic control that have already raised the minimum wage and are looking for the next way to improve workers’ lives. But as is the case with basically any pro-worker law, change at the federal level will never come with Republicans in charge.
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