 that Dr. Herot Romo here and Dean Sons are coming out as well as many faculty members, students and community. Thank you for your time. Many of you know me. I am Dr. Martell Teasley, Chair of the Department of Social Work. Thanks to Dean Sons and the University, we have distinguished lecture series and each department in the College of Nursing has the ability to invite a guest each year. Our guest today, Dr. Julie Henley, I first encountered in a rather peculiar way. It was in August of 2013 when we were planning for a major social work conference here in one of the hotels downtown and we had booked a room to have a reception there, give us some prestige, meet new people, as well as we were recruiting for faculty at that time and I got an email from Dr. Henley with the inquiry about finding alternative setting for the conference because it seems that many of the low-income workers who were the maids and janitors there were on strike and being a person who does research on labor. She did not feel it ethically bound to not actually participate and went up against some pretty big people but I want one when she sent me that email we quickly changed our reservations from the Hyatt to the Marriott and so we and also the conference the Society for Social Work Research also changed its venue so just a example of advocacy and that at every level we must keep striving for change but without further to do I did not also know that one day and during that year we were recruiting doctoral students that one of her students Dr. Alfred Perez from the University of Chicago would actually done these halls here at UTSA in the Department of Social Work and so we have both of them here today and I'm going to let Alfred do the introduction of Dr. Henley. Thank you Dr. Teasley. Good evening. Oh come on you guys have to wake up. Good evening. As Dr. Teasley said my name is Dr. Perez and I'm an assistant professor in the College of Public Policy. Before we get started I want to make sure that we thank the College of Public Policy Dean Syez, the City of San Antonio Department of Human Resources, the Head Start Program and the Alamo Workforce Solutions for underwriting tonight's webcast on nowcast.com. After tonight's talk it will be available on nowcast.com and available on YouTube so thank them for their generous support so that we have this important event archived. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Dr. Julia Henley who's going to talk to us tonight about work and child care in the context of economic disadvantage. This morning the online Atlantic Monthly Magazine published an article titled The Very Real Hardship of Unpredictable Schedules. This article shed light on the plight of American workers with unstable work schedule. This article cited groundbreaking research on how unpredictable work schedules can lead to difficulty obtaining or keeping government benefits such as child care subsidies. This research which we will learn about more shortly has been informed national state and local policies. For example Dr. Henley's research was used to develop the first in the nation limit on worker schedules in the city and county of San Francisco. So now let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Henley. She's an associate professor at the University of Chicago and faculty affiliate at several poverty and economic policy focused centers including the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty and the University of Michigan National Poverty Center. She co-directs the Employment Instability Family Well-Being and Social Network at the University of Chicago and is a member of the steering committee of the United States Department of Health and Human Services Child Care Policy Research Consortium. Dr. Henley's research focuses on the intersection of family poverty, low-wage employment and social welfare policy especially child care and family policy. She has investigated parental child care and child care search strategies, the demands parents jobs place on child care providers and the responses of providers to irregular and unpredictable parental work schedules. Dr. Henley is currently the principal investigator of a study of child care subsidy of a child care subsidy program in Illinois and New York and co-principal investment studies of employment instability in the U.S. labor market. Dr. Henley's work is supported by the federal government and private foundation and her work has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals and edited books. In addition to her scholarly achievements Henley is an exemplar teacher. She is the recipient of the University of Chicago's Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award and was recently honored with the University of Chicago's inaugural award for excellence in doctoral student mentoring. Now help me give a warm UTSA welcome to my colleague and mentor Dr. Julia Henley. Do I need this? Should I use this? Yes? Okay. So let me get started here coming out on this evening. I know that it's tax day and I hear there's an important soccer game. I think Mexico is playing the U.S. and a friendly and there's the talk next door you could go to so thank you for being here. I wanted to do today as Alfred said the title of my talk is instability and flexibility in today's labor market is a lot of words to say that I'm going to talk about on the one hand I have three parts to my presentation. I first I'm going to give you a little bit of view of the low-wage labor market in particular talking about labor market trends over the last 30 years and how they've sort of by recent by the recent great recession on which we're still trying to get out of I'll in that part one of the talk I'll talk both about what we sometimes call between job instability or unemployment right you lose your job and so that's the problem or and also and I'll actually spend more of my time here on within job instability and that's when you have a job but your job is very precarious and so I want to think a lot about today I want to talk about today labor market trends both in terms of between job instability and also within job and then in the second part of my presentation I'm going to pretty briefly actually talk about what we know in terms of how employment instability matters for family dynamics for work family management for some parenting outcomes and for child care but I'm going to be fairly brief there because I want to get to part three which is to share with you some new research that I've been doing on the implications for employment instability again both this between and this within job instability for public policy and in particular for our child care subsidy program which I'll say more about so I'm going to spend most of my time today on the first and third section and the middle of this talk will be shorter than okay so so I'm going to be drawing mostly from work I've done across four different projects but I'll also reference the broader literature so I won't just be talking about my research and my colleagues research but sort of the broader literature as well and I want to take time now to acknowledge these projects especially the ones that I've been involved in my funders and my collaborators and especially the dozens of masters and PhD students over the years that have worked on these studies I will say more about that last project Illinois New York child care research partnership because I'm going to dig deeper into that study the other three I'm going to just you have to trust me that they were well-designed and careful studies I'm not going to say a lot about about the design although I'm happy to talk more about any of them in the question and answer period okay so employment instability in the US has increased over the past three decades due to structural changes in the economy labor protections and evolving employer practices that pass risk on the market in addition we've experienced four recessions over this time the most and in their 2011 paper on economic instability Harry Holzer and his colleague write that very large is in unemployment rates and durations have occurred in the recent downturn and were experienced primarily by less educated younger and minority who had already experienced relative declines in their earnings and employment over the past three decades so there's been this growing trend of deteriorate of a deteriorating labor market especially for low-wage workers and the recession of 2008 2009 was sort of a double whammy for that for that group this slide shows two indicators of economic instability and this is for the general population not just for low-level workers unemployment rates and duration of unemployment the 2010 numbers the bar to the far right for each of those bar graphs gives an indication of the seriousness of the great recession now the unemployment rate is down from 9.7 in 2010 to below 6% I think it was 5.5 percent in March but duration of unemployment spells are still pretty high at 34 weeks only one week left in addition we continue to see large numbers of see also continued growth in what is very hard time jobs are always more common during sluggish economic periods and you can see that on the graph the problem has been especially severe in the great since the great recession at its peak about nine million workers time and this is about 6.7 million people but it's still 6.7 million people right in March which is a long way from what we saw in the just as full-time work is increasingly difficult to find we know that it's a critical route out of poverty for most people so regardless of demographic group the poverty rate for households with a part-time part-year earner that's the yellow road is substantially higher not surprisingly perhaps than for the for households with a full-time year-round worker you need full-time work to get out of poverty or most people need full-time work to get out of poverty now this graph tells a print story as well and not one that I have as much time to talk about today and that is the important in poverty all right so what I'm emphasizing here is no matter what demographic group you're in you're much more likely to be poor if you're if you have a part-time worker in the house rather than a full-time worker in the house but the other story here of course is that compared to overall certain demographic groups are much more likely to be poor whether or not they have a full-time or a part-time right so rate structure and ethnicity matter a lot in explaining poverty but my point here that I really want to emphasize is having full-time work also matters a lot so there's been growing attention as Alfred suggested I've done I've been working a lot in this area growing attention to work schedules as another less studied form of employment and stability this within job stability that I refer to. Two-fifths of American workers now work the majority of their hours during non-standard times many of you may work the majority of your hours during non-standard times. Only 29% of American workers work a nine to five full-time Monday through Friday job so the minority of in several studies my colleague Susan Lambert and I and I have to say that credit that Alfred gave me in the introduction much of that work or all of that work on work schedules is done in collaboration with my colleague Susan Lambert who has taken the lead on several of these studies so I don't want to take her credit. In several studies Susan and I have shown that in addition to non-standard time which is where most of the research is low-wage jobs are characterized by schedule unpredictability in the number and timing of work hours and limited employee control over work schedules. For example in a comparative case study of businesses across financial transportation retail and hospitality industries Susan and I found that low-level hourly workers routinely work not just every once in a while but routinely variable schedules and fluctuating work hours typically receive one week or less notice about the following week's work schedule with frequent last-minute schedule adjustments that schedule is pretty typical and that's a part-time sales person at a department store when asked to describe her schedule she replied well usually we plan a specific on a calendar and so this week I would say I'm working three days in which days are those I asked I worked yesterday oh well actually four days so Sunday 12 to 5 2 to close that's 8 30 I'm off today Wednesday I got to work 5 30 to 8 30 Thursday and Friday I'm off and then Saturday I'm working 1 30 to 9 and I say like an idiot oh and that varies a lot and she says yeah so Janna another person who I interviewed who worked full-time as a cashier refers to the unpredictability of her schedule simply saying everything is different and open nothing is consistent in another study we conducted of a national retail chain we used payroll data instead of parent interviews so hard data for those of you that like don't think of interview data as real data to document the kind of our variations employees experienced by plotting employees hours of work over time and here's what we found or here's an example of what we found so this slide which I'll explain gives you a sense of just how variable employees schedules can be this is one store in our study of a national retail apparel firm and this firm has hundreds of small stores across the nation you've probably you they each store has between 10 to 20 employees each line on this graph and it's hard to even line but each line on this graph is a worker the y-axis vertical axis is the number of hours the employee worked each week from the payroll system so this is real data it's not self-reported the x-axis is time from July 2012 to December 2012 so it's a short period and this is what I would call a high variation store so if you follow any employee you see how much variation there is in this store but this is a low variation store and I would argue this is a lot of variation too so on this store you can't really even tell who's part-time and who's full-time right there's just so much variability here this is one of the lowest variability stores that we have in our sample and you can tell the full-time workers are working on average clearly more hours than the part-time workers but there's still a lot of dips and flows over the over six-month period right and so workers experience my point here is that workers at least those who we've studied in these small focused studies a lot of fluctuation in work hours at least in the retail industry which I'm focused on and the point that I want to make here is that those fluctuations and work hours not only matter for kind of organizing your life which I'll talk about in a minute but they also matter for your take-home pay right so if you work five hours one week and forty hours the next week and two hours the next week and maybe for two weeks you don't work at all that's not just affecting your everyday work life it's also affecting your take-home pay and I think that's important to keep in mind until recently it's been impossible to say just how widespread precarious scheduling practices have been and I would say that was the biggest criticism of the work I've been doing with Susan Lambert for a long time people saying well you know how common is this how prevalent is this you have these small focus study in certain industries or with certain employers what does it look like overall so national survey to get at work hour instability schedule unpredictability and lack of schedule control we added them to the 2011 round of the national longitudinal survey of youth and then they were read administered in 2013 data yet but we have I'm going to show you some data from 2011 so the national longitudinal survey of youth or the NLS why is it's called has followed a large representative sample of individuals since 1997 when they were adolescents so it's a panel study they're following the same people over time the respondents are now in their late 20s and 30s and I'm just taking this cross-sectional 2011 sample and let me just share some summary statistics with you these are participants who are currently employed as I said they're between 28 and 33 years old okay so this slide shows descriptive statistics on the three indicators that we added to the survey first column one shows our fluctuations and this tells you how much work hours vary in a month relative to usual work hours so it's really a it's a metric that's created from asking what's the most hours you worked in a month what's the fewest number of hours you worked in the month and what's your usual work hours and we create metric which is maximum minus minimum over usual and so what the way to interpret this is fluctuate a lot so by more than 40% of the usual number of hours from mothers and fathers and across all racial groups full-time low-wage workers show the least fluctuation but 30% of their hours are still fluctuating in a month compared to their usual hours the second column short notice indicates that one third to one half of workers across all the demographic groups receive their schedule with one week or less advanced notice so we weren't sure of what we were finding was just a retail effect but it looks like it's not a retail effect it looks like across many occupations and industries people get their hourly workers in particular get their hours with limited advanced notice and finally the third column schedule input shows that close to 50% of workers in each demographic group report having no control over their work schedule meaning that their employer decides they're starting and ending times without their input so it's unsettling I think to find the precarious work schedules are so widespread especially among early career workers because as I'll show you next research suggests that these job characteristics interfere with caregiving and can make it difficult to use public assistance programs such as childcare subsidies so let me move on then to the next part of my presentation and show some ways in which employment instability especially precarious work schedules are passed on to families overall research shows that precarious work schedules are associated with a perceived employee stress with perceived work family conflict with interferences in non-work activities like child taking your kid to the doctors or your mother to her you know aerobics class and also to children's well-being that there's there's a clear link a correlational link at least between precarious work schedules and children's development much of this research focuses on the challenges to families of working outside of daytime weekday hours I would say 80% of the research out there has focused on that first of precarious work schedules that I talked about that not but increasingly studies are starting to look at the other dimensions so in my research with Susan we found that families who have unpredictable or variable schedules also report having greater perceived stress have a greater time actually on all those indicators except we don't have a study yet that's looking at child outcomes but in all those other indicators we find a pretty strong correlation between precarious work schedules and these different kinds of family dynamics and those relationships those correlations hold even after controlling for a lot of other demographic factors and other factors about the the job so instability in work seems to translate into problems at home I have recently replicated so I first did this study with Susan Lambert in the retail industry I've recently replicated these relationships in a study all of parents who use child care subsidies I'd looked at the relationship between the instability of the their work and these outcomes and I see exactly the same patterns and they still hold even when I when I control for a variety of factors now these are not experimental studies so we don't know for sure that that relationship is causal and it might not be it might actually causality may go the other direction even we don't know but we are seeing the relationship over and over again in addition schedules like the ones I'm talking about also constrained families child care options most child care centers as those of you with children know offer care during daytime weekday hours only institutional formal centers as a result parents who work non-standard hours as well as variable and unpredictable hours disproportionately use family friend and neighbor care to take care of their children it's also common for families with precarious schedules to use multiple child care arrangements to respond to these sorts of schedules because it's often difficult for one single provider to be available available on demand all the time when multiple arrangements can signal when sometimes multiple arrangements can signal intentional stable packages of care so maybe I want two providers maybe I want my child in a nice you know nine to two center followed by my mother picking up my child like so sometimes they're intentional packages but more often than not for people with work schedules that are fluctuating in variable the packages are put together at the last minute to accommodate these fluctuating and unpredictable work schedules so they're not as intentional and desired as we might we might hope okay so I've talked about the prevalence of employment instability and how employment instability is not just a matter of unemployment and underemployment but also a matter of work schedules or within job instability I then showed you how employment instability especially precarious work schedules can complicate family life and child care now I'd like to turn to part three of my talk and ask what the employment context that I've just described to you means for public policy there are many social policies designed to improve the economic well-being for example the earned income tax credit temporary assistance to needy families or tana and the child care subsidy program which I will increasingly access to these policies are contingent on employment that is work is an eligibility criteria to social welfare policies and as I'll show you in a minute the employment instability that I've been talking about can interfere with families with families ability to effectively use government programs such as these that are designed to support employment and economic well-being so there's kind of a catch 22 that during times of the greatest economic need when work is not stable or doesn't exist at all a family has access to the least support from our public safety net I'm gonna focus on one government program in particular as I said the child care subsidy program which is the where I'm spending most of my time right now on this on this particular Illinois New York project so let me give you before I jump into my study let me give you just a little background on the child care subsidy program because I'm not sure if everyone knows what it is so child care assistance the child care development fund funds the child care subsidy program is a means support program it came into being as part of the mid 1990s welfare reforms some of you many of you I hope are old enough to remember me this I kind of came of age on with my PhD I'm right at that time when welfare reform in 1996 was passed when the 1996 reform has passed so that ages me I guess the emphasis of the 96 law was to reduce cash benefits and to turn the welfare system into a work-based safety net child care subsidies are in many ways a perfect exemplar of this work-based safety net employment for example as I said is a condition of eligibility parents must be employed and in some cases in school but it's disproportionately used for employment in order to even access the program so you need a job first before you get on the subsidy program you can't get on the subsidy program and then look most states at least the cost of child care is subsidized as a mean of means of encouraging employment so in that way it's also part of our work-based safety net and low-income parents can only use the program to help pay for child care during the hours that they're working and then most states provide some allowance for transportation to and from work so I want you to think about that in relation to all that instability in the labor market that I just talked about so the primary goal is work child development is this only a secondary goal and I think that's very important to think about and if we have time in the question and answer period for those of you that are interested in preschool and pre-k and zero to five child development questions I think the childcare subsidy program was never designed with its primary goal of improving children's developmental outcomes now there's a hope that it improves children's developmental outcomes and now with recent federal changes to the law there's very very intentional focus on improving the quality of care for childcare subsidy users but the primary goal of the childcare subsidy system is to help parents work it's a work support it's not a tool of child development first and foremost in most states so subsidies federal block grant to states and the block grant is about five billion dollars and it's been about five billion dollars since 2002 it went way up from 96 to 2002 the funding and then it's really leveled off and it actually has not adjusted for inflation so it's lower now if you adjust for inflation than it was in 2002 and you can see that in several ways but one way in which you can see it is we have about 1.5 million children using childcare subsidies now in the nation and that's fewer children than we're using childcare subsidies in the early 2000s so the program has lost money and serves fewer people than it did ten years ago the law was reauthorized the 1996 law was reauthorized just this past November and there are many changes to the law which I would be happy to talk about in the question and answer period if people are interested in in learning more about it I think sort of it's curious the the new law I was saying this at lunch today the new law actually incorporates a lot of the research so I feel like the new law is a better law in many ways than the one we had problem with the new laws it still doesn't it's not and so we're asking states we're giving them a block grant and telling them to do even more with their with their program than we had before so I think it's a really hard hard change that states are gonna have okay several studies show the positive effects of subsidy use unemployment and I really want to emphasize this because I'm gonna be talking about a lot of things that will make you think I don't like the subsidy program very much and that's absolutely not true I think childcare subsidies are really important work support for parents and I think that there's good evidence that subsidized parents do better than parents who don't receive subsidies in the labor market so if your goal is employment I I'm not trying to say that subsidies don't encourage employment and help employment however I think as you'll see subsidy the subsidy administration and the way the subsidy program works interferes with and doesn't sort of mimic the reality of the labor market which gets in the way of the program being as successful as it might so I think there's reason for concern as I said the programs inadequately funded and there's significant program instability there's several studies out there across many states that show a lot of movement off and on the program people stay on the program for short periods of time we don't know very much actually about what explains that instability and I'm gonna share with you some of our findings about what explains that instability in Illinois New York or what we think is going on and we also don't know all that much about what happens to people's childcare arrangements when they lose their subsidy so the subsidy is basically a voucher to I mean it operates differently in different states but it's effectively a voucher to a provider that the state pays to a provider to reduce the cost of care and then a parent usually pays a copay to the provider when a parent loses the subsidy we don't know all that much about whether parents then leave their childcare arrangement or whether they are able to cut a deal with the provider and stay or what sort of what I'm gonna talk about we dig into that a little bit as well so all of these concerns about instability and these unknowns led us to this project that I want to say something about now and it's called the Illinois New York childcare research partnership and it's an interesting project in that it's a partnership between researchers at the University of Chicago me and my colleague Amy Cleason and researcher Heather Sands from at the Urban Institute in DC and then the childcare administrator so the program administrator of the subsidy program in the state of New York and the state of Illinois and then local child leaders who implement the program in the four regions that we're targeting to in each state which I'll talk about in a second so it's a collaborative partnership that is designed to answer certain very policy relevant questions with the goal of actually improving public policy and you know maybe even improving the lives of the people that use the program ideally our goals then are to examine instability in order to understand the factors that lead to movement often on the subsidy program and to understand what happens to childcare arrangements when you lose your subsidy that's those are the two driving questions of the project okay so really briefly we focus it's not a statewide study in Illinois and it's not a statewide study in New York so I'm kind of I should be careful to say we're studying this in Illinois and in New York what we're really doing is studying the childcare subsidy program in two regions in Illinois and two regions in New York in Illinois we're focused on Cook County which is the largest but has the most populous county in Illinois it's where Chicago is located and it's where the vast majority of all childcare subsidy recipients live seven county large region but without a lot of recipients downstate Illinois in the southwestern region of Illinois that includes both rural areas and also small urban high poverty communities like East St. Louis which is actually in Illinois not in Missouri in New York it's very interesting we don't have New York City in our sample we have two suburban regions and there's very little work done on the operation of public policies in or the implementation of policies in suburban areas so we're kind of excited about this data it's Westchester County which for those of you that know New York it's sort of north of New York City and Nassau County which is Long Island and so these are both fairly wealthy communities but there are a lot of poor people that live in them and so it's an interesting case of how of access and stability of subsidy in communities that have been you know for the most part not not studied so we're not because of these very different geographic locations I have to be very careful about comparisons across the the four areas because they're very different right so we want to there's a lot of things that are different demographically contextually end with the program in each of these four communities we drew a sample of new entrance on the subsidy program when I say new entrance I mean there was no evidence that they had been on the program for the prior two years they might have been on and some of them were on earlier all of the people to be eligible for the study had to have a child between zero and four and they might have older children as well but they had to have at least one child zero to four and so we took a sample and followed them over time we're going to have 36 months of data right now we have 18 months of data and we have child care subsidy records data so we have all the data from the administration on their childcare subsidy use over time so that's longitudinal month-by-month data actually week-by-week data in New York and then we have a second sort of level of data which is a random survey of the same the same group and we survey them 14 months get on the program because what we want to do is we want to retrospectively ask them about their trajectories on the program we're interested in understanding subsidy instability if we interviewed them right away when they got on the program they wouldn't have too much to say to us about stability because they won't get on the program for a couple weeks or whatever so we wait on average 14 months after they get on the program and ask them a set of health and survey about their childcare history over this time their subsidy program use over this time the employment their employment use over this time their housing over this time and so on we then have a third sort of data source which is a sample of 85 of the 612 survey respondents who we visit in their homes and talk for a more extended period between 60 and 90 minutes asking them particular questions that we found interesting in the survey so it's to try to enrich the survey data we have these qualitative interviews and we are qualitative sample is very diverse in terms of how they used the program so some are short-term users some are longer-term users some are cyclers and also demographically they're diverse we have as with the survey we have immigrants we have non-immigrants we have TANF people who are in both TANF and child care subsidies people who are only on child care subsidy stamps we have people with non-standard work experiences as well as people that have more traditional work experiences and we have families with multiple children as well as families with individual children and we very intentionally picked that diversity so we could try to have a you know a qualitative understanding of in a more anecdotal sense of some of the things that were coming up in the larger the larger data sets okay so I want to give you just in my remaining time just a selection of findings from our project I could talk longer than you would want me to I'm sure on this project it's all very fresh in my head because we just finished a final report for the administration for children and families three different I'm going to give you some answers to three different questions or what I think are answers to three different questions first of all how stable is subsidy program participation this analysis has been done in other states as well and what we're finding really corroborates what other states have found second what increases of subsidy exit and child care exit so we're going to link that administrative data to the survey data and look at predict exits off the program within this 18 month period or if you prefer what are the risks to exit and then finally I'll share some qualitative stories with you about this so what we find just to give you a spoiler in terms of what increases the risk of subsidy and childcare exit guess what the labor market matters a lot and employment instability which was sort of the setup then of my talk really explains a lot of why people are leaving the program and why people are leaving on their childcare arrangements so the qualitative data will explore the kind of the intersection of employment and the subsidy program a little bit more okay so first question what does stability look like for this population on the subsidy program our analysis of the educational childcare program so the administrative data as I said really supports past research documenting the dynamic nature of subsidy use so row one but the majority of families use the subsidy for one year or less row to continue to show is that by 18 months which is our final data point at this time by 18 months more than two-thirds of the families in our sample had exited the program now that's not necessarily bad right maybe they don't need the program anymore so I'm not really saying anything about if an exit is desirable or not I can't tell you that with this data yet but we know that there's relatively short spells on the program and then row three shows that even in this 18 month period about a third 25% or to a third of people that left return again so if you just look at who leaves and asked did they return in that 18 months you see that several of them return now that's a kind of funny statistic because obviously they don't have very much time to return if they left in month 16 they might very well return in month month 24 but we don't have month 24 right so you have to kind of be careful with the interpretation of that last row my point is just that there's a lot of what we call cycling even in this short this short window you're likely seeing some important state and county differences in this in in this picture and that's because they're there and this might actually help you see that this is just a survival curve it's called which basically for those of you that haven't done this kind of work it shows basically just follows people over time and looks at when they leave when they drop out right and so it's called the Kaplan Meyer survival estimate and it's tell and it's each line is a different region the red is New York and the blue is is Illinois and so what this shows is consistent because it's the same they're the same numbers with what you just saw on table form but it shows that Illinois folks are staying on for a shorter period of time than New York folks and that there's a little bit of difference between the two Illinois counties than the two New York counties a lot of what's going on here in the state differences in the region differences which I don't have time to show you but I'll just tell you is much in between the states has to do with a policy difference between the two states in Illinois every six months a family has to do what's called redetermine their eligibility they have to go back fill out new paperwork to prove that they're still eligible in New York you don't have to do that until 12 months I don't know what it is in Texas does anyone know it used to a long time ago was three months but I don't think is it still three months so states vary it's they have discretion this is one of the changes in the new law that they're not going to have discretion anymore after the in the next two years all states will have to be at 12 months but for now New York and Illinois are very different in their one is six months Illinois six months New York's 12 months and you can see that it matters right if you follow the blue lines you see there's a bigger drop off at six months then there is for New York New York is actually kind of even in Illinois there's a drop off at six months and then another drop off at 12 months and that we think has to do with eligibility period because all happen we find and this is what I don't really have time to talk too much about when it comes time to recertify some families are no longer eligible many families are still eligible but it's such a hassle to it or there's delays or there's paperwork problems and so they get cut off sometimes even when they are eligible and they are trying to get back on so the move and the program is partly explained by simply this three certification period length okay so what a second question what is the what explains these exits well I told you one big explanatory factor which is the eligibility period that's a big one and in any sort of regression you do if you put eligibility period in you see that that's very predictive of leaving the program but multivariate analyses also indicate that employment and other program characteristics also increase the risk of subsidy exit and of leaving a childcare arrangement so when I say employment characteristics the big one is job loss perhaps not surprisingly if you lose your job you're likely to leave the subsidy program even in Illinois where they have a 90-day period job search allowance that's supposed to allow you to look for work without losing your subsidy we found in our qualitative data this is a good example why it's nice to have the qualitative that many families didn't even know about the job allowance so when they lost their job they were no longer eligible and left the program so job loss is a big one but so is unexpected work hours work schedule control so those two kinds of within job instability that I had brought up before seem to be very important for predicting exits in terms of the big one is the recertification period but in addition difficulty finding a provider that would take the subsidy problems and delays with the application process were also important predictors of subsidy exit and then in addition subsidy exits themselves are important predictors of childcare exit so remember I said earlier we don't know very much about when people lose their subsidy do they also lose their childcare arrangement well we found that not everyone does many of our families do stay with their childcare arrangement although it's very hard to stay with a childcare provider if the childcare provider is a formal center after losing the subsidy because you just as a low-income parent or even a moderate but so it was informal providers who were more likely to make arrangements for families to stay with them after the loss of a city but overall subsidy loss was a strong predictor of childcare exits as was the job characteristic variables as were the job characteristic variables and the other program primary variables and childcare type okay and these findings I should say are all net of several controls for childcare for demographic and for program site so finally then let me say something about our qualitative data which really corroborate quite well I think the survey findings and elaborate for us how rules and expectations of the subsidy program really don't reflect I would argue the everyday experience of parents in the labor market so study participants first of all before I get to the negative universally report that childcare assistance is the necessary work-family support that allows them to work so Kerry I like this quote says well without the subsidy I wouldn't because I wouldn't be able to pay for childcare and if I couldn't work then I wouldn't be able to pay for anything so at the same time that subsidies are so important to these families the majority identified both job related and program related factors or the intersection for explaining their the instability or their the reasons for exiting the program in the qualitative so very consistent in that way with the survey but let me just say some of the ways they talked about jobs and program administration kind of colliding so unemployment was clearly the most commonly discussed problem in the qualitative interviews for the reason for losing the the subsidy for example Miranda this first quote that you see here she lost her subsidy after losing her job and she didn't have subsidy coverage during the job search period so she actually lived in a community in one of the communities that didn't allow job search but as I mentioned even some of our respondents who lived in communities that did allow job search didn't so Miranda says when you lose your job they don't give you a certain amount of time to go look for another job and still be on the program you automatically just get cut off which is really hard to do because you can't look for a job with a kid there was time when I had my son with me and there was nobody to go I mean to look after him and I went to a job interview I had to take him so Crystal and Susan both made too much money and that's why they were no longer eligible that might be a good thing right you're earning your way off the program that you know that's a positive in Crystal's case though she lost her benefits after a $1 raise causing her to send her child to live with her mother for the summer in another state so some of you may be familiar with this thing that's often called the cliff effect so the earned income tax credit has a very slow cliff you don't get cut off right away when you reach a certain income you can stay at that income for a long period and your benefit gets tapered off slowly with the childcare subsidy program at least in Illinois and New York it's a vertical drop it's a vertical quit come upper income limit once you make $1 more assuming you report it you're you're no longer eligible so that came up for losing the program Susan is interesting because she got a great job she was the most highly paid person in our sample thousand dollar salary job and you'd think this is perfect right she you know earned her way off the program and she could no longer afford childcare for her three kids and so what she ended up doing was reducing her full-time care to three days a week and then relying on family members to make up this make up the slack in addition other aspects of employment also came up as important to understanding why people left the program job conditions many of those that we've already talked about make it difficult sometimes to verify your eligibility and to redetermine your eligibility so in Kimberly's case because she was paid by a personal check rather than formal pay check with taxes taken out she had to fill out special paperwork it wasn't that she couldn't she was still eligible in theory for the childcare subsidy but it was a different paper when it was so onerous and so confusing that she ended up having a gap in her in her subsidy spell so do and she didn't know she had in her case she didn't know she had to fill out this this special paper and her case worker she her and so it was a very confusing process in Courtney's case her self-employment was the problem they required her to fill out all sorts of paperwork about not just her earnings but all everything she sold even when it wasn't take-home pay and she worried that that would make it look like she earned too much money and even though she wasn't bringing that money in and the process was just so complicated that she ultimately decided not to reapply when her time when her eligibility for the program was needed to be redetermined so there are many other examples that I could share with you about how employment conditions led to difficulties verifying eligibility in several cases leading to a subsidy exit sometimes these exits were temporary and sometimes they were permanent the kinds of things that happened you would see movement from full-time to part-time work and in Illinois at least you get you become eligible when you apply either for a full-time or a part-time subsidy so if your status changes you have to reapply and that can then cause trouble moving from a job training program this was an issue for the TANF respondents to a market private sector job often led to a temporary and sometimes a permanent break in subsidy enrollment variable hour jobs which I've already spent a lot of time on were really problematic people's whose jobs fluctuated up and down in terms of number of hours and the reason for that is what I said earlier that you have to very tightly link your childcare subsidy hours to your work hours so if one week you work 20 hours and you have a subsidy that's supposed to give you 40 hours of care you can't use those extra 20 hours because you had a slow work week and so you have this sort of game you play matching your subsidy to your work can be really really difficult and center healthcare providers don't necessarily say okay you don't have to pay me this week because you're not working that's from the provider side that doesn't make sense providers are small businesses or in some cases large for profit companies and there's often complications as well with reporting a job change so people who move from job to job just trying to verify with the office that they've changed employers often resulted in a subsidy exit even when people were still eligible okay so the summary of my argument then that I'm trying to make today is three points first of all precarious employment is widespread and especially a problem for low-income workers not just unemployment but underemployment and what I've been talking about as precarious work schedules this employment context I've argued has implications for families it creates stress and come in conflicts with caregiving demands and it limits childcare options especially in the formal center care market at a time when we hear again and again from policymakers and child developmentalists that we want to figure out ways to increase access to and other forms of kind of school readiness especially for two to four year olds childcare subsidies finally are an important work support but they don't fit well with the realities of work this leads to instability in the program and instability in childcare arrangements so that's my the summary of my argument in conclusion let me say that you know the story is not just a negative one it's not like I don't like employers high-road employers do indeed exist in fact there's a lot of variation that we find that I didn't talk as much about I didn't emphasize that part for the for this talk but in the work that Susan Lambert and I have done employers manage their workers in vastly different ways and in there's some workplaces that work quite well for low-level employees and there's some work places that don't so I would argue though that employers need to be incentivized and maybe even mandated we can debate that if you will to do the right thing through you know so I think through policy we can craft incentives or mandates for employers to think about the work and the family lives of their of their employees the second point I want to make is that it's right now it's not the employers it's the providers and the families that are largely absorbing the instability of a labor market for low-income families it's these guys the providers and the family members I think that are really the heroes in this story because they're the ones that are actually filling in absorbing all that employment instability and making things still work making it so that we still do actually have work and family lives we haven't completely given up on the work on the family side but their limits I would argue that we cannot expect families in the childcare market to solve the problems of the low-age labor market I think there has to be a role as I've said both employers and for public policy policies need to recognize instability in the labor market they need to smooth instability rather than exacerbate it and I think that's a big charge right we need to think about how to create a safety net that helps families absorb the instability in work rather than makes it more difficult for them instability at work to increase subsidy program stability in particular several reforms to the subsidy program worthwhile considering very practical things first of all I think we need to think about reducing administrative burden one way to do that is to lengthen the eligibility to something like 12 months which as I suggested the federal government has signaled the states need to do but that's going to make things more costly because if we let everyone stay on for 12 months without increasing the budget there's either going to be additional waiting lists on the on the entry side right because it's going to cost there's gonna be more people on the program that stay on the program so the instability right now is allowing some states not to have waiting lists because the churning just allows new people to come on right so we're going to let people or arrange for people to have more stable experiences on the subsidy program then we're going to need to think about the size of the program and what we can do to increase on the budget if the goal is to allow the same number of people on the program I also think we need to think about improving customer service this is such a long-standing issue in human services especially that it's just kind of often not always but often a kind of mean environment and it's because it's not because workers don't care because I think because of constrained resources and inefficient systems often that make it really unpleasant both for workers clients to try to access services so I think thinking about the administration of the program might actually get us a little bit further toward program stability that can support work I also don't think we need to think about changing rules around work and I've suggested this already so I won't say too much but I think it's really not helpful to so tightly link employment to subsidy eligibility so yes we should probably have some employment requirements for subsidy access if it's a work support program that makes sense but to force parents and workers to calculate very tightly the number of hours of work and making sure that that meets perfectly the number of hours of childcare I think is counterproductive it's a large cost administratively and I also think it leads to a lot of instability that doesn't help families ultimately improve in the labor market as I suggested the 2014 childcare development block grant which is the new childcare subsidy law actually proposes both of those things I just said and as I said before I'm just not sure how the states are going to implement them without more money so it's kind of a work in progress I think so finally then given in talking about policy given the prevalence and the source of employment employment instability I really want to underscore that I don't think work and family challenges can be solved just by these childcare subsidy reforms so while I'm a childcare subsidy scholar and I'm you know interested in reforming subsidy programs so it works better I am not naive enough to think that a perfectly run childcare subsidy program will produce a lot of middle-class workers I think there's a lot of things that have to happen in the low-age labor market and in other other domains in order to improve the work life and the economic well-being of low-income families so I do think childcare subsidy reforms important it's a it's sufficient so in that to sort of just end then I think we need to start thinking about we don't like to talk about too much in the United States at least and that is thinking about reforms that are reforms directly of the labor market think some of the legislation that's being proposed now are passed in San Francisco Alfred mentioned that the federal government in the federal government both in the Senate and in the House last year a bill was introduced it died almost immediately but it was introduced and it's going to be introduced again called the schedules that work act that actually requires employers to provide greater flexibility and stability in work hours that would require for example on call workers to get paid at least a portion of a day's work if they're if they show up at work and they're not and then they're sent home those are called reporting and reporting laws reporting pay laws some states have those laws on the book you might have heard recently the Attorney General in New York is because New York has a reporting pay law on the books he's investigating some large employers in New York who he thinks are violating potentially the reporting pay laws but those laws that are not most states don't have those kinds of laws and I think we need to start thinking about really work-based laws in addition to family policy and those two things together might actually I would argue get us somewhere so I will end there and happy to answer questions or have conversation thank you yes so I think that's a huge issue and in Illinois we're seeing it a lot because in Illinois our finance our budget is so constrained that we're not paying our providers several providers are not getting payments are getting late payments from the state subsidized providers and they're at risk of closing and I think some of them have closed as a result I actually think some of the policies that I'm suggesting might be worthwhile or reforms would help child care providers because I think they would result in more stable payments to providers so for example if we reform work and make work somehow more stable and more predictable that means the families have more predictable and stable take-home pay and so families whether or not they're subsidized should be able to be payers of child care in a more responsible way or a more stable way similarly if we funded the child care subsidy program even anywhere near the level that it would need to be studied need to be funded to meet demand and to and to deal with these new the law I think the states would have an easier time paying their bills right I think the provider voice in this research is absent and actually next year this is a multi-component study and next year we're doing this provider study so I'm really excited we're going to talk to providers across sectors so centers family licensed family child care homes and informal licensed exempt homes we're going to talk to them about their experiences with stability and instability and care and also about their views on on sort of turning the subsidy program into more of a child development program which is something that Illinois is very interested in thinking about about doing so I you know I don't have an answer really to your question other than the providers are just are also at the sort of whim of of this instability right what is the variation in employers what do employers do the sort of high road employers what does their man and what do their management practices look like around scheduling and how is it that they can they can deliver schedules that are more predictable and more stable and then what are the implications for families so there are a few things that managers that we've studied and this is I think there's not a lot of research on this first of all but the managers that we've studied where we saw variation the kind of ones I would say that were I hate to say good and bad but that were better at thinking about the demands that employees their non-work demands they did a few things first of all it's very tempting in retail or other demand focused industries to over hire so to hire 30 employees for 30 employees where if they head 10 employees they actually could very easily staff their store and the reason why they're tempted to do that there's two reasons one is if the question is trading full-time or part-time full-time sometimes comes with benefits and fixed costs right and so it's more expensive for them to hire full-time workers if that comes with a whole set of other fixed costs so that's one issue but even if you take that off the table because that's a real constraint that employers are in and they have to some employers have to have you know a fair number of part-time employees because they you know they're not going to spend that money on their on their employers employees we find that hiring fewer part-time employees and basically promising than employees more hours right because if you have 30 employees just do the math you can't all get 20 all right so so we found that so one thing we found that employers who hire fewer employees their employees then get more hours and their hours are more consistent and we link that directly with level hard data on this higher retention lower turnover so we show in two different studies years who hire fewer employees per hour of labor that they're that they're using have better turnover have better employee turnover and satisfaction in our service so that's one thing another thing the employers can do is schedule this line from my colleague Susan because I like it they can schedule around the stability in their in their business rather than schedule around the instability in their business so what do I mean by that if you ask managers in retail they say well you couldn't possibly give predictable schedules because everything's always changing we need to very closely link our labor costs to demand and and you know one day we'll be busy the next day we won't be and so we really have to have this this variability and this ability to be flexible with our labor force but we looked at their data and we found that 80% of the hours in this firm that we studied were stable so they're absolutely right they have to allow for fluctuation and we get that so there's gonna have to be at some fluctuation in schedules from week to week percent of their labor they can perfectly predict there has to be someone and in some stores there has to be two or three people to open the store oh it's busy we're gonna send everyone home right someone has to be there to staff the store most in retail there's has to be a certain number of people on the floor for theft prevention and so and they know these things ahead of time but they don't schedule a they don't schedule around the stability some do but some don't so that's another thing that the sort of higher road I would say the higher road employers do is they say okay well we know that you know 80% of the time you'll work Monday Wednesday Friday 8 to 2 and then you have to give us 20% to be flexible around and employees appreciate that so those are two kinds of things setting schedules with advanced notice almost in retail is just very very common many of you have probably worked to get your schedule on Wednesday for the next week starting on Sunday and it's a week at a time and you keep getting it or you might say oh we don't need you and get sent home and giving people more advanced notice taking into account the stability I think would matter and some and there's variation there I think while a week in advance is very typical there are some retailers that do three weeks in advance or a month in advance yeah yeah so the answer is yes and the answer is in this in the studies that I talked about it's hard to pull out clear and I think it's because of what I would call kind of a flora fact meaning that the white non Latino non African American non Asian in my sample we're working pretty crappy jobs with fluctuating schedules perhaps not as crappy and not treated as poorly as the others but I think because there was such an on average downward kind of pressure of of really in some well I won't use the word exploitation I guess but these are hard jobs to work in they're not well compensated and our public programs are not easily accessible to anyone I think that having said that some I absolutely believe that certain groups have a harder time getting access to the programs and have a harder time getting the little bit of goodies that are in these jobs right but these studies haven't really allowed me to pick that up as much as I would like I can't say a few things about race differences when I see them and when I don't and ethnic differences when I see them and when I don't in the childcare subsidy study because it's a big enough survey and there's it's pretty racially ethnically diverse so I can tell you when there is a difference and when there isn't in our regression analysis so the story for the Latinos in my sample I think it's a really important and interesting one we know from other research that Latinos at least in Illinois New York but I think this is true elsewhere are much less likely to use the childcare subsidy program and I people don't I don't think we have good data for why that is but I think we can guess why that is and they're more likely Latinos are more likely to work highly fluctuating and variable work our jobs and those jobs are harder to gain access to the program to begin with I think that to the extent that there's concerns whether or not one's undocumented whether you're putting yourself and your family at risk by it by using services I think that that's another reason why you are less likely to use the childcare subsidy program this study didn't answer those questions this study investigated when you're already on the program is there a race or ethnic difference right so we're probably getting in our in our sample a select group of what we are getting a select group of all the racial and ethnic subgroups that were that we're studying so that's one thing to think about nevertheless what we find or I think that's important to think about what we find which is Latinos in my sample have less problem with subsidy instability than non-Latino whites and African-Americans so in other words they stay on the program longer and I think that's for two reasons I think it's because of the selection effect you're only getting the Latinos on the program who already have kind of a more stable and perhaps educated although actually doesn't the education doesn't show difference so that's one reason and the second reason is we know that Latinos work more than any other group any other ethnic group right and work out to stay on the subsidy program so I my guess is that our look and we do see by various differences in the number of hours on average that our families work as compared to our other groups so I think it's the consistent number of hours of work and the selection that is explained subsidy experience of our Latino subgroup we see no race and we see no African-American white African-American Latino differences on any of the other measures in the quantitative analysis I don't make a huge thing about race or ethnicity in this study because I feel like I can't talk about it very responsibly because I don't have enough I don't know what a non-finding is really I don't believe that there's no difference in experience yeah I'm getting that some of our interventions are a little too late generally think about your spirit so you're a UCSA we're a health police going to be graduating you and you will be a leader in your field some of you will be a leader in social service if you're a social worker you will become a manager and so you will be responsible for how you manage your employees if you run a group home are you going to have well-paid full-time employees or you're going to have a lot of low-paid part-time employees so these will be decisions that will be under your burden and your responsibility to advocate for your employees that's one of the ways that rubber meets the road on this issue another way I'll be curious about your own environment as you were speaking about the work schedule that I was reminding you of in your current age you've probably seen her around probably this is a self-contracted that's not probably I know it's self-contracted so these are not going to hurt employees that they serve you one of those employees has to work she's a Latina and does work two jobs every day she works here and she goes at the stacks of work there's a reason she needs to do that you can figure it out this is your own community think about what role you can advocate within your own city and this is just one of the examples you get I said you have many world commitments where as a leader and future social worker, scholar, community member you can do a lot of help I want to thank you for this research because it sparked a lot of ideas in us about how that works day to day on the ground in our world can I add one more place where it intersects I think for many of us especially when you go out and give a social work job our clients are often asked to come into the office for a counseling session or some other kind of meeting at a particular time and then we get really frustrated and we very quickly I think blame them for not showing up and not being responsible and not following through and I think it's useful to step back and think about some of the reasons for why they might not show up and be able to follow through and I think understanding this instability in work and instability in housing and instability and all different domains of people's lives can help us understand, not always excuse but help us understand why things are harder than we want them to be when we're delivering services and so I would just add that to the list How can we solve this together? So if you have a client and there is a child there I can get a job, et cetera, et cetera that's an opportunity for you to have them recognize their needs but also their resources so I'm going to be talking about your population and I totally agree with your proposition but also I know that maybe my Pia she is able to help me on this project for a while but I don't really need that subsidy right now so that we may be accessing other resources and I'm captured in the data I think those kinds of things exist We're going to take one, two more questions Okay, perfect Thank you for that The Affordable Care Act has an unintended consequence that you are on 30 hours a day you may have spent with some employers and they've been docked even now for a little 30 hours So I don't have the data to answer that question I will say that we don't really know if employers changed their behavior because of the Affordable Care Act we know that employers said that they used certainly the Affordable Care Act to help explain hiring part-time workers That happens a lot So for example, in San Francisco several years ago there was a minimum wage increase and also a couple of changes that were potentially costly to employers and a lot of employers then responded by saying vocally a policy position and an advocacy position we're going to do all these things to our worker we're going to have to not support our workers and hire fewer workers and lay people off and then when researchers later a few years later looked at what was going on there's actually very there's no blip at all in that period this isn't my research I don't know it very well but there's no evidence that they actually changed their behavior but they were clearly concerned about the policy change and talked about how they were going to have to make changes in part I think to advocate against the changes from happening So we don't really know I don't think how serious the 30 hour Affordable Care Act requires our workers I wouldn't be surprised if we're going to see it but I don't think we know that and with my data I can't My question was you mentioned that there is with work disabilities higher perception of stress and higher stress overall I was wondering in terms of mental health if there is high prevalence of certain types of mental health issues in this particular problem So I do not have in any of my So the question was whether or not in addition to perceived stress affecting stress whether there were other mental health outcomes having to work precarious work schedules in our data we don't have we didn't collect data on mental health outcomes other than perceived stress but in the broader literature in the health literature actually there is evidence that non-standard people that work non-standard hours I don't know about the other fluctuating work hours but non-standard hours and shift and night workers there's very clear physical health connections to that kind of work and I think that data is pretty good it's usually you find it in medical journals I say it's pretty good it's not what I do so I can't really evaluate it I should be careful it seems like there's an accepted link between some kinds of non-standard employment and physical health problems Harriet Presser who has done a lot of research survey research on the relationship between non-standard work hours and a whole bunch of dependent variables that are available in national surveys she may very well have in some of her work looked at not depression as measured clinically but a depression scale depressive symptoms she may have demonstrated you'd have to look at her research a link with depression I know that's a measure that people often use in similar kinds of literatures but I can't answer that all I would say is if it's affecting perceived stress it's going to show up in other kinds of general mental health measures whether it would show up in clinical mental health measures I don't know for your visit and also for your very informative and stimulating talk and we'd like to give you a little bag of goodies from UTSA and if we can close up with sharing with me and thank you for her talk thank you very much