 From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte and this is Better Life Lab. When you think of flexible work, a lot of times we think of something that mothers need or caregivers need. Other times we think of millennials and how younger workers want to have time for work and life. But there's a flip side to flexibility that a lot of people don't think about. Don't we walk in and we look on the list and we see, oh, we're an extra. It's not even about the hours, it's just about, you know, I just need to make 20 bucks to put gas in my car. They only give you what the computer tells you and they won't go over that. It's a struggle. And if you don't have a set schedule, the responses will get another job. And how can I get another job if I don't even know what hours and should be at the job that I do have? Hourly workers, retail workers, restaurant workers, they're now suffering from too much flexibility. There's always been some unpredictability in these jobs. But in recent years there's been a marked increase in precarious and unpredictable schedules, split shifts, clopenings, on-call work, schedule changes at the last minute. So what's going on here? Why are so many workers facing an epidemic of schedule chaos? To help us find our bearings, I've asked a real giant in the field of work-life issues to join us, Joan Williams. Joan's books include what works for women at work and many others. And she's the director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California Hastings in San Francisco. Joan also recently co-led a vital study of the impact of unstable schedules on the American retail workplace. That research points to some clear changes, changes that could help workers and boost company profits at the same time. So Joan, welcome. Hey Bridget, it's great to be here. What I'd love to do is listen together to the stories of several workers. And throughout these stories we're just using first names and we're not identifying the names of stores or restaurants where these workers work. And we're doing that because we found that there's really no one bad actor. What we're describing is a systemic problem. We're going to first hear from Adrian, a nine-year veteran of a big-box retail store in Los Angeles. I spoke to him right after his shift, just as he got back to the crowded department in LA that he calls home. Things were unusually quiet there, except for the beeping of a smoke detector that needed its battery replaced. It's a sort of another sign of the chaos of his life. I asked Adrian to describe his typical weekly schedule. It's very unpredictable. It can be anywhere from two working days to five. You can be scheduled five one week, the next week two, the next week three. Before you had a human who would actually write out the schedule. Now it's a computer who spits out like this is the hours that the system thinks that you should have and you shouldn't go over it. So the computer thinks that there are some days that you should only work one day and other weeks you should work five days. It's all some algorithm that's deciding your life. Yes, ma'am. That's exactly what they base their schedule on. So this is artificial intelligence and what kind of life are you able to lead based on what this artificial intelligence suggests is the best for the store? A very stressful one. And you have the human part there in the store. They see the need to have more workers there, but there's still nothing they can do. Or at least they tell you that because they're saying that this computer says that based off the sales that you had last year, you don't need that many manpower. They have a quota and our main managers, if they surpass that amount of hours, they themselves don't get their bonus checks. Last week, I heard the human rep, because we have walkie talkie at our job, and she contacted my boss and she's telling him, hey, we went over 60 hours for the week. We have to cut 60 hours. So they proceeded to tell people to go home and then they called team members and told them, don't come to work. So all that work, they pushed on to the few, very few people that were left. So it makes everything because the system told them, hey, you went over on hours, you got to cut hours. So they're more enticed to tell people to go home because then they get their bonus checks. Wow. So are you considered full-time or part-time? I was hired as a full-time nine years ago. So do you actually still get benefits? I get health insurance, but in order to maintain my full health benefits, I have to work a minimum of 32 hours. So when a schedule comes out and I'm scheduled three days, I actually argue with the HR people, you need to keep me at 32 hours, because if I don't have at least 32 hours a week, I will end up losing my benefits. And what do they say when you tell them that? Well, that's just the way the schedule came out and that's the company needs. So I end up having to scavenge for hours, which a lot of us do. So I tend to go for people that are very young and most likely still live with their parents. Okay, I know you don't want to work. Let me have one of your days and that's what we do. A lot of us do. We go around pretty much asking and begging for hours. So you basically have to beg your way into a full-time schedule in order to keep your benefits like health insurance? Yes, yes, yes. So Joan, what's going on? What's happening to so many retail and restaurant workers out there? As Adrienne points out, schedules used to be made by people for people. And then the conveyors of computerized scheduling came along and said to retailers, hey, I'm going to help you match labor supply and labor demand in real time so that if there are fewer patients in the bed or fewer customers at the restaurant, we'll get rid of those hours so that you can control labor costs. So this was modeled on just-in-time inventory. The only problem is that people aren't widgets. And as Adrienne's story points out, unlike widgets, they have rent to pay. Unlike widgets, they have bodies that need health care. And unlike widgets, they have families or school that they have to schedule. You work different days every week, different hours every day. Often you also work on call shifts, which typically means that you're scheduled for a shift, but it might be canceled anytime up to two hours before the shift is supposed to start. I mean, he's unusual and then he actually is supposed to have a full-time schedule. The classic just-in-time schedule is just a part-time schedule, which means that you're only given part-time hours, but you have to keep your time open so you actually can't take another part-time job because then the schedules of the two jobs conflict. And the image, for example, in retail has been that this is just college kids earning beer money. But we found in the stable scheduling study that that's inaccurate. Over 50% of the workers reported food insecurity. Over a quarter reported being late on utility payments, and almost 20% said they delayed going to the doctor getting prescriptions filled. These unstable schedules are really a recipe for economic insecurity and poverty really feeding into severe income inequality in the U.S. So let's go from here to a woman who works for another big box chain. The store where she's worked for years is in El Paso, Texas. My name is Patricia. I work for a store in El Paso, Texas. And I work for the Delhi Bakery Department. And do you mind if we ask how much she earns per hour? Right now they're paying me $12.10 after almost 10 years. And I think I'm worth more. Usually I start at 5 a.m., but the end time varies. I can end at 11, 11.30, 12.30, 1.30, and it is all fluctuating. I don't receive any government assistance and I have to pay for everything out of my one income. So Patricia, do you have family? Are you also supporting children or other family members? Well, practically it doesn't depend on my child. So she has a young daughter that depends on her. She's a single mother and her son and his wife are living with her. And they just had a baby, another baby. So we all live in the same... Yeah, her son has two babies, so now they all live in the same home together. Many times when I don't get enough hours that I need to pay for everything, I have to be extremely conscious of every single penny that I spend because I know that any little bit will eat into my other bills. So I can't buy my daughter food from outside of the home. I can't take her anywhere extra where we might spend money and she might want something. And how does that make you feel? Frustrated. So Joan, we've just heard from Patricia talking just about that very point that you made. Yeah, Patricia's experience really dramatizes the effects of these kinds of unstable, fluctuating schedules on workers. It's really stressful to be in this situation where you never know how long your shift is going to be and how much money you're going to end up earning. And six out of ten of the workers we studied had physical symptoms like headaches and stomach aches. Those kinds of physical symptoms often are a sign of stress. And we now know that sleeping less than eight hours can have serious long-term health consequences. Really serious, I mean, things like strokes and heart attacks. And so when we shifted a group of hourly workers to more stable schedules, one of the things that we found is the self-rated sleep quality improved by nearly 7% on average. And that's going to have long-term health effects, which of course will be important for the individual, but they'll also be important for the society because the kinds of health effects we're talking about are very expensive at a society-wide level. So I wanted to talk about your stable schedule study in a moment. But first, I want to play for you the stories of two women that I talked to who work in an industry where schedules are notoriously chaotic, the restaurant business. First, we'll hear from a server at a chain restaurant in the Pacific Northwest. My name is April. I live in Washington State. I've worked for a d*** for 13 years now. Love my job, most of it. So what do you do and what do you love about your job? I'm a server, so the flexibility is one of the main things and I have cash in my pocket when I leave at the end of the night. From tips, and you mean? So you like the sense that you don't have a fixed schedule, that it's always fluid? To a degree. We have shifts that it's called a TDA, which means to be announced. They use that TDA to catch the flows. Say everybody showed up for their shift, but a person doesn't want to work. So that TDA person will switch spots with that person. So we like that, the flexibility and stuff. That's what we all love and we just don't get our schedules in time enough to plan certain doctor's visits because sometimes we get days off together, sometimes we don't. Does that kind of throw your life into some kind of chaos or what's that like? Yeah, because we don't know where a TDA until we get there. We walk in and we look on the list and we see, oh, we're an extra. So you could come into work thinking that you're going to get a set number of hours and then be sent home? Yeah. It's not even about the hours. It's just about I just need to make 20 bucks to put gas in my car. I just need to make 50 bucks to pay this bill. You know what I mean? Yeah. Because if we're hungry enough, the hours are there. And really, it just depends on the person. If it's the beginning of the month, OK, because you got your rent paid. So, you know, it's not that big of a deal to be the TDA. But if it's the end of the month when you're trying to pay your rent, oh, that is a big deal. You can't afford to take the loss. That's when you start hounding everybody, hey, you want to go home? Hey, you want to go home? Seriously. So when do you get your schedule? How much advance notice do you get? I get my schedules on Thursday night for the following Monday. So that just gives you just a few days. Right. One of my old bosses, even she said, you know, that they would be willing to do two weeks scheduling. And that's really all we're wanting. I mean, the managers get their schedule out in a month. Two weeks is not unheard of task. So I wonder, like, people who have childcare or needs or need to take care of other people, how do they manage? Well, we just learn to adapt. I mean, really, because we're such, even though we're a corporate chain up here in our restaurant, we're such a family. We have such camaraderie. So, you know, everybody's there is grateful and thankful for their job. You know what I mean? So we talk to each other. We, hey, I got to take my kids to the doctors today and somebody cover for me because we have a Facebook page that's just as employees. So that's where we go when we don't have the source schedule. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't. So it's the workers yourselves. You're the ones that are basically figuring out how to make this work for everybody. Right. So, Joan, there's a lot to dig into here. But before we do, let's also hear from Laura. She worked for nine years as a barista and a server in New Orleans, where she, unlike Washington State, but most of the rest of the country, the minimum wage for servers is only $2.13 an hour. $2.13. The logic goes that you make up the rest in tips. And these days, Laura is working as an organizer. She's advocating for better conditions for restaurant workers. I reached her on her old cell phone as she was driving back into New Orleans with two restaurant workers. One of them named Cupcake told me that she sometimes makes just $30 for her whole shift and that she can't schedule Christmas or Thanksgiving or family gatherings because of her unpredictable schedule. After Cupcake finished, Laura got back on the phone. She really wanted to tell me about some of what she's experienced firsthand. My name is Laura. I lived in New Orleans, Louisiana. And so we're driving. We just crossed over Pontchartrain Lake. Most people think of New Orleans. They think of Beignets and Mardi Gras and jazz. And they don't think about the extreme gap between white folks living in New Orleans and black folks living in New Orleans and how huge the hospitality industry is. So one in four people in the city work somewhere in or around the hospitality industry. It's literally plantation politics, right? Even the language, front of house, back of house, field, slave, house slave. You see that carried on in the racial breakdown of who is working in what restaurant. Did you have that experience of having an unpredictable schedule? And if so, what was that like and what impact did that have on your life and how you're able to live it? So I have worked at bars that were open for multiple shifts of the day. And that's only because I wasn't going to school. I don't have kids. I was able to deal with it as an ever-changing schedule. So I would be on the schedule that I'm supposed to work two to ten. I would get there at two, and they would not let me clock in until it got busy enough. And if it never got busy, then they would just send me home. Wait a minute. So you're actually there. You're waiting around, and they can literally send you home with no pay? Yes. They gave themselves 60 minutes. And if I walked in and it was closed, they would just say, wait a minute. We're going to feel it out. But with zero pay. So what does that do to you when that happens? And it seems like it's such a common occurrence. What does that do to the way you live your life? I think it depends on the financial situation you're in. For me personally, because I'm a light-skinned black person who has an easier time getting out of house jobs where people do tip more, where the money is better overall. I think for me, if my bills were paid, sometimes I was happy to go home and say, great, I have an afternoon, right? But I think that if you had calculated that cost into what you need to make for the day, then you're devastated. And if you don't have a set schedule, I think a lot of times the responses will get another job. Right. And how can I get another job if I don't even know what hours and who could get the job that I do have? Yeah. Right. It's impossible. Does it have to be this way? Is this the only way that restaurants and the hospitality industry can stay afloat is if basically workers lead these just chaotic and really inhumane lives? No, it's a matter of control, right? So I think the restaurant industry would be better off by not doing it this way. Because it's so chaotic, there's so much turnover and the cost of retraining people, the cost of having angry workers who steal, right? I've stolen from every restaurant I've ever worked at because I was angry and it made me feel good to leave with some fries, right? Or for my friends to come in and get free food. And I do that because I'm treated like crap by my employer. And so I 100% believe that the profit margin for restaurants would be higher if they had a staff that they took care of. So Joan, that was Laura in New Orleans. And so much of what she and April had to say, they're stories that you hear over and over again of anger and frustration and confusion and they just want to know what their schedules are. Why is this happening and is this really the best way for businesses to stay afloat? Well, I mean, first of all, the kind of thing that Laura was reporting where she shows up and has to wait around an hour to see if she's going to get any hours. That is arguably illegal. If you're employed, you have to show up to your employer and stay on location. I may be weird. That strikes me as work. So she's being paid $0 for work, which is below minimum wage, by the way. So that's a really extreme case. But more common are on calls where you're scheduled for a shift, but then they might cancel it up to two hours in advance. And the minute you work into a restaurant, you can see the racial employment hierarchy of the United States in just such blank terms where the front of the house is often predominantly white and they're the tipped employees and the employees who make far better wages and the back of the house typically is people of color and they don't get tips and they're in a very different economic position. And she really highlights the effect of these just-in-time schedules on workers and there are decades of research that document what's called poor execution where you go in and you can't find the sweater and you ask an associate and they haven't a clue and they actually don't really care that much. There's just a level of chaos that is similar to the chaos that Laura reports in restaurants. And so what you have is these computerized schedules being sold as do the best for your business, match labor supply and labor demand and keep that fit really tight. But if you keep the fit too tight, then you are driving up back-end labor costs that are never counted as labor costs, constant turnover, lack of adequately trained staff, even theft. And so what we found in the stable scheduling study is that when we shifted a group of retail workers to more stable schedules, sales sharply increased by 7%. 7% is a big increase in brick-and-mortar retail in this day and age. That's amazing. Why is that? What happened? Execution improved. They could find the sweaters. What largely explained this was a retention of more experienced associates. And so when you have a shift to more stable schedules, you make more money. I mean, the location of this study was at the Gap Retailer. And in the intervention stores, they made $2.9 million more in sales. Wow. And if you begin to treat people more like workers who you want to invest in your business, the workers do invest in your business. You know, you write about that, the hidden costs as you call them. And yet you make such a case for why it's actually in your business interest to treat your workers as workers and invest in them rather than as widgets that you can just sort of fling around willy-nilly with AI. Why aren't more stores, why aren't more companies taking that to heart and actually making some changes in treating workers like workers? I think this is a really fascinating story here, Bridget. When the results of the Gap Stable Scheduling Study came out, the co-PIs presented it in various business contexts. For example, at Harvard Business School, people absolutely accepted the rigorous findings of the study. No pushback. Oh, yeah, we totally believe that happened. But there was very little interest in shifting your own company's workers to more stable schedules. And the reason they don't act on it is that it's a really complicated organizational change challenge. You need to change not only your scheduling practices, but you need to change other practices coming out of headquarters that have very concrete impacts on schedules. And perhaps the most concrete example is something that Adrian mentioned, which is that if a store manager staffs for more hours than headquarters thinks they should be staffing for, then the store manager loses their performance bonus. And so going over hours has a more acute effect on your comp than increasing sales does. So of course, people are focused on not going over hours, which means that people show up, they send them home with no hours. It just all sounds so crazy. It sounds like, you know, business isn't doing right by itself, they're definitely not doing right by workers. I want to play another story of sort of we're talking about these sort of unexpected or unintended consequences. She's a young woman who works in retail in Philadelphia and she's been trying to save money to go to college. And so she took this new job thinking that that would really help her reach her goal. Okay. My name is Tatiana and I work for a big retail company. I get paid $12 an hour. Before, my other job was getting paid eight. With my job before, I had fixed hours and I had five days a week. But now I have $12 per hour and the schedule is all messed up. So, you know, how does that all average out? Were you actually earning more when you were earning less per hour? Honestly, it's the same pay. Yeah, I mean Tatiana's experience is really important in a lot of ways. The self-image often of retailers is, oh, these are just kids making beer money while they're going to school. And that's not true. A lot of workers are depending on the incomes for basic things like food and rent. But the other thing that Tatiana's experience points out is that these very unstable schedules which kids often take in order to support themselves through school or to make money for school subvert the kids' futures. So Tatiana doesn't get enough hours in order to make money to get to school. A lot of kids, they take these retail jobs to support themselves while they're in school. But because of the unstable schedules, the kids are paying tuition to pay for classes that they now can't attend because their schedules are so unstable. These unstable schedules subvert the economic opportunities of the college kids. So for the final story, I want us to return to Adrian, the big box store worker from LA who we heard at the start of the show. I think Adrian's story really brings home the impact that Schedule Chaos has on so many workers today. Struggle. It's a struggle. You know, how am I going to pay certain bills? Which ones are the more important ones that you have to pay? Mind you, I live in California, so rents are very expensive. It's like playing with your life pretty much because it's like, I got to pay for rent. I got to pay for my car. And if you want to maintain good credit, you got to pay for your credit card bills. And sometimes food is the last thing that you have on your list. Do you have family or do you have caregiving responsibilities? Fortunately, myself, I only live with my partner. I did move in with my sister because I couldn't afford to pay rent on my own somewhere. It was way too expensive. So I live in a household with there's four adults and two kids in a one-bedroom home. What? How do you wait? Where does everybody, how do you do that? My partner and I are in a bedroom. My father built bunk beds in the living room and my sister lives in the living room with her partner and her two kids. That's many families here. I can't speak for the rest of the country. I know what we have here in Los Angeles. I know the stories of my coworkers. I know there's individuals at my job with their families. The ones that I know that have kids, those are the ones I worry about more. Right after Christmas, you have people coming off of working five days a week and then they went straight to working a day. Like, who can survive off of working five days a week cut down to a day? So, yeah. Man. You know, so I guess, you know, one of the first questions that comes to mind, which, you know, it's like, why do you stay? Because I feel like I've I've fought and struggled to get the measly things I have now. And if I can find my way to get at least my 32 hours, it's the same thing everywhere. And I feel like, well, if I really did the fight where I'm at now, I want to go somewhere else and start all over again, fighting all over again for the same the same thing that I have now. I don't think mentally I can do it again. I did my nine years. Why would I go from one mess to another mess? Yeah. Why can't they just fix the mess they have now and make it better? It wasn't like that. When I first started working there, after about two years ago when they did that minimum wage hike, everything changed so drastically. They completely completely started cutting things so bad because they cut department and that work still has to get done. We're doing a job of what six people used to do. So how has it changed your life? The change to $15, the living wage? You know, are you getting more money? You know, even with the scavenging of the hours? I am now making exactly the same thing that a new hire makes. Hmm. I'm all for these new people to make money. I just felt like they should have compensated us with raising our wages. Yeah. Everything is based off the company needs. They may say they work with people on their schedules, but that's hogwash. I've been there for the hiring process. If someone says on their applications that they're in school and they have specific hours they can work, they don't get hired. Hmm. With an open schedule. Because we're there for them. They're not there for us. There was one moment when I was trying to go to school and I tried to ask them for certain specific days. And I was told, well, you know, you might get less hours because it's going to be based off what we need and what we have available for you. And that was it. So of course, at that point, you decide to give up on moving up and you stay stuck where you're at. I give my all to whatever I do and a small job, like working at a retailer. I'm still going to earn an honest day living and I'm going to earn it. So the fact that I work and I give them all my time, I feel like they should do more for their team members. I know the struggle. I live the struggle and I see the struggle and it's hard, but there's that part where I'm like these big companies can't just get away with what they're doing. They wouldn't be nothing without these workers. How hard is giving us five days or 32 hours a week? But it's all a game. How can they save on the backs of the workers? One thing you have to realize is that there's no way in God's Green Earth Adrian is going to leave his job. He has a full-time job, Bridget. Do you understand how rare that is in retail? Yeah. He's one of the lucky ones. Which is crazy because his life is so insane and to get those full-time hours just to keep his benefits. So he can live in an apartment with four adults and two kids in a one-bedroom. He has to beg for his schedule, you know? Unbelievable. It is unbelievable and you hear how he's dedicated to his work. I know. He takes pride in it. So, Joan, what do we do about this? Adrian says fix the mess and make it better. How do we do that? There's two different ways. We talk about the country a series of predictable schedule initiatives that are trying to set up minimum labor standards. Eliminating on calls or making them more expensive and requiring two weeks' notice. I think Oregon was the first state that passed that law. The first state. They exist also in a number of cities. Those are important but they're minimum. Those are minimum labor standards and what intrigues me is the business model. Because this is a broken business model and changing it represents a win-win for workers and for the businesses. As you're talking what comes to mind is Henry Ford. For all of his faults he was really instrumental in bringing work hours down back in the 20s and 30s using his own internal research found that working five days a week instead of seven actually made a productive. Paying them more a livable wage and giving them time off actually helped his product because people had time to use his automobiles and then they had the money to buy them and he was able to make that business case and others kind of followed his lead. I'm wondering do we need some kind of corporate leader here? I think the reason that we need a corporate leader is that it's not just a matter of swooping in and changing scheduling practices. The change needs to go deeper. The shift to more stable schedules for example at a big retail company involves operations, human resources, finance it involves shipment and marketing. That's a lot of departments that now have to be working together in a very different way. And what we really need is corporate visionaries who say okay I'm going to travel that difficult and complicated path from this broken model to a model that will be a win-win both for the company and for the people it employs. You know I'm struck so many workers like Adrian said he felt stuck or they like Patricia felt frustrated. Is there anything that workers themselves can do? Oh absolutely. I mean since the 2016 election the attitudes towards unions have really changed in the United States. There's still a lot of people organizing around these issues and what's effective as always is change at the top and demand from the bottom. All right change from the top demand at the bottom and then all of us work together to fix the mess. Absolutely. Joan thank you so much for talking with us today so appreciate your time. Bridget it's always a pleasure. Joan Williams a true leader in the field she's the director of the Center for Work Life Law at the University of California Hastings. Joan's books include unbending gender and what works for women at work and to Adrian, Laura, April, Patricia, Tatiana, Cupcake and the other workers who took time out of their own chaotic and busy schedules to share their stories with us. Let me say a very very big thank you. For more resources on working healthier go to newamerica.org Click the link for Better Life Lab review us on Apple podcasts if you like the show or do it the old-fashioned way just tell your friends and tell your boss to listen. Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate. Thanks for joining me for our podcast about the art and science of living a full and healthy life. Our project is a collaboration with Ideas 42 supported by the Robert Johnson Foundation. David Shulman is producer of Better Life Lab. Hailey Swenson provides research assistance. It's crushing. Next time we'll hear from power couples and Uber drivers alike who are striving to make egalitarian relationships really work. We have all of this amazing technology why aren't we leveraging it to change the American workplace so that people can be with their families. From New America's Better Life Lab I'm Bridget Shulte.