Instability of Work and Care: How Work Schedules Shape Child-Care Arrangements for Parents Working in the Service Sector

2017 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dani Carrillo ◽  
Kristen Harknett ◽  
Allison Logan ◽  
Sigrid Luhr ◽  
Daniel Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Work Schedules

scholarly journals Hard Times: Routine Schedule Unpredictability and Material Hardship among Service Sector Workers

Social Forces ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schneider ◽  
Kristen Harknett
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Food Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Work Schedules ◽  
Material Hardship ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Advance Notice ◽  
Food Service Workers

Abstract American policymakers have long focused on work as a key means to improve economic wellbeing. Yet, work has become increasingly precarious and polarized. This precarity is manifest in low wages but also in unstable and unpredictable work schedules that often vary significantly week to week with little advance notice. We draw on new survey data from The Shift Project on 37,263 hourly retail and food service workers in the United States. We assess the association between routine unpredictability in work schedules and household material hardship. Using both cross-sectional models and panel models, we find that workers who receive shorter advanced notice, those who work on-call, those who experience last minute shift cancellation and timing changes, and those with more volatile work hours are more likely to experience hunger, residential, medical, and utility hardships as well as more overall hardship. Just-in-time work schedules afford employers a great deal of flexibility but at a heavy cost to workers’ economic security.

scholarly journals Couples’ Work Schedules and Child-Care Use in the Netherlands

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 1119-1130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Verhoef ◽  
Anne Roeters ◽  
Tanja van der Lippe
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Work Schedules

scholarly journals Consequences of Routine Work-Schedule Instability for Worker Health and Well-Being

2019 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Schneider ◽  
Kristen Harknett
Keyword(s):  
Service Sector ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Social Determinant ◽  
Poor Sleep ◽  
Work Schedules ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
Precarious Work ◽  
Health And Well Being ◽  
Low Wages

Research on precarious work and its consequences overwhelmingly focuses on the economic dimension of precarity, epitomized by low wages. But the rise in precarious work also involves a major shift in its temporal dimension, such that many workers now experience routine instability in their work schedules. This temporal instability represents a fundamental and under-appreciated manifestation of the risk shift from firms to workers. A lack of suitable existing data, however, has precluded investigation of how precarious scheduling practices affect workers’ health and well-being. We use an innovative approach to collect survey data from a large and strategically selected segment of the U.S. workforce: hourly workers in the service sector. These data reveal that exposure to routine instability in work schedules is associated with psychological distress, poor sleep quality, and unhappiness. Low wages are also associated with these outcomes, but unstable and unpredictable schedules are much more strongly associated. Precarious schedules affect worker well-being in part through the mediating influence of household economic insecurity, yet a much larger proportion of the association is driven by work-life conflict. The temporal dimension of work is central to the experience of precarity and an important social determinant of well-being.

Who Cares if Parents have Unpredictable Work Schedules?: Just-in-Time Work Schedules and Child Care Arrangements

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen Harknett ◽  
Daniel Schneider ◽  
Sigrid Luhr
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Food Service ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Just In Time ◽  
Work Schedules ◽  
Adult Supervision ◽  
Time Work ◽  
Time Scheduling ◽  
Established Relationship

Abstract Working parents must arrange some type of care for their young children when they are away at work. For parents with unstable and unpredictable work schedules, the logistics of arranging care can be complex. In this paper, we use survey data from the Shift Project, collected in 2017 and 2018 from a sample of 3,653 parents who balance work in the retail and food service sector with parenting young children from infants to nine years of age. Our results demonstrate that unstable and unpredictable work schedules have consequences for children’s care arrangements. We find that parents’ exposure to on-call work and last-minute shift changes are associated with more numerous care arrangements, with a reliance on informal care arrangements, with the use of siblings to provide care, and with young children being left alone without adult supervision. Given the well-established relationship between quality of care in the early years and child development, just-in-time scheduling practices are likely to have consequences for children’s development and safety and to contribute to the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.

scholarly journals “I’M LUCKY” . . . TO HAVE FOUND CHILD CARE: EVOKING LUCK WHILE MANAGING CHILD CARE NEEDS IN A CHANGING ECONOMY

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Albanese ◽  
Tanya Farr
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Local Economies ◽  
Market State ◽  
Changing Economy ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Standard Service

This research<a href="http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ijcyfs/author/saveSubmit/3#_edn1">1</a> looks at the impact of the rise of women’s non-standard, service sector employment on gender roles, identities and relations, and compares the complex task of finding and managing formal and informal non-parental child care in rural and semi-rural communities in two policy jurisdictions (Ontario and Quebec) in the Ottawa Valley. It seeks to understand the ways in which the neo-liberal reconfiguration of local economies impact on the experiences of employed, non-urban women with young children – mitigated by provincial policy decisions – through documenting the strategies they adopt to cope with challenges when managing this family-market-state nexus. This paper specifically focuses on mothers’ use of the notion of “luck” in describing how they found and managed their unique child care needs. Luck, in the psychological literature, is often treated as either an external, unstable, and uncontrollable cause, or an internal personal attribute. This paper shows that its use and invocation in response to questions about finding and managing child care has to do with gendered perceptions of control and power(lessness) over social circumstances related to geography, government policies, and changing, and at time precarious, economic/labour market circumstances. <div><div><p> </p></div></div>

scholarly journals Parenthood, child care, and nonstandard work schedules in Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mareike Bünning ◽  
Matthias Pollmann-Schult
Keyword(s):  
Child Care ◽  
Work Schedules ◽  
Nonstandard Work ◽  
Nonstandard Work Schedules

scholarly journals Improving health and economic security by reducing work schedule uncertainty

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (42) ◽  
pp. e2107828118
Author(s):  
Kristen Harknett ◽  
Daniel Schneider ◽  
Véronique Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Sleep Quality ◽  
Service Sector ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Substantial Effect ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Causal Effects ◽  
Work Schedules ◽  
Subjective Well Being ◽  
Work Time ◽  
Work Scheduling

Work schedules in the service sector are routinely unstable and unpredictable, and this unpredictability may have harmful effects on health and economic insecurity. However, because schedule unpredictability often coincides with low wages and other dimensions of poor job quality, the causal effects of unpredictable work schedules are uncertain. Seattle’s Secure Scheduling ordinance, enacted in 2017, mandated greater schedule predictability, providing an opportunity to examine the causal relationship between work scheduling and worker health and economic security. We draw on pre- and postintervention survey data from workers in Seattle and comparison cities to estimate the impacts of this law using a difference-in-differences approach. We find that the law had positive impacts on workers’ schedule predictability and stability and led to increases in workers’ subjective well-being, sleep quality, and economic security. Using the Seattle law as an instrumental variable, we also estimate causal effects of schedule predictability on well-being outcomes. We show that uncertainty about work time has a substantial effect on workers’ well-being, particularly their sleep quality and economic security.

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