Josh Russell
In the service sector, workers’ schedules are often unreliable and inflexible.
When you walk into a store, you may focus on the clothes or the wristwatches or the papier-mâché glue or whatever else you’re shopping for. When you walk into a restaurant, you might think about bloomin’ onions or craft beer or how many calories you can allot for dessert.
But shift your focus a little bit and you’ll notice the waitstaff, bartenders, cashiers, clerks, and the many other people who make commerce happen. These are people who, in many cases, have no idea what their work schedule will be, week-to-week. They get paid so little they may have a hard time paying rent; they work so hard they may not have any energy left for game night.
We want people to have jobs and be productive, tax-paying members of society. Yet retail jobs, a large area of employment, offer very little stability. Recently the podcast Better Life Lab chronicled the problems workers face with uncertain scheduling. In one case, a worker was hired “full time” and given health insurance contingent on working at least thirty-two hours per week.
About half of the employees at a national women’s clothing chain didn’t know what hours they would work week-to-week.
But when it came time for the actual scheduling, the employee wasn’t always assigned thirty-two hours per week, and had to beg, borrow, and steal hours from other employees to meet the threshold. Imagine a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company having to meet some kind of weekly threshold in order to maintain his or her benefits.
Often, workers are told on a daily basis whether or not they must come in to work. Again, picture going to your cushy job on Wall Street with your pour-over coffee and three-inch business casual heels only to be told to go home.
In fact, about half of the employees at a national women’s clothing chain didn’t know what hours they would work week-to-week. These are people with leases and cell phone bills and a pesky need to eat actual food for survival. They are moms and caregivers, people who must coordinate child care and elder care without knowing in advance how long they’ll need it. No amount of organization, iCal trickery, or multiple alerts can make up for not knowing what time work starts.
I don’t want to make too big a deal out of moms and dads with needy children because all workers—single, married, those with ten cats or human sextuplets—should be treated with dignity, not a shifting schedule that feeds their anxiety.
But what really gets me is that this practice doesn’t even make sense for business. A 2018 report, zestfully titled “The Stable Scheduling Study,” found that “increasing the stability of work schedules is possible and even profitable in today’s competitive retail environment.”
The study did an experiment on a random group of Gap stores at which schedules were set two weeks in advance and on-call shifts (the kind where the company could decide to call you in or cancel on you at the last minute) were eliminated. The stores tried to maintain consistency in scheduling, and made a few other technical adjustments.
After implementing these changes, the test stores increased median sales by 7 percent. As in, more cash money. And isn’t that what capitalism is all about?
More stable schedules also result in less turnover. This stands to reason because, as with everything else in life, if you’re treated well, you’ll be more loyal. Having effective and loyal employees means more satisfied customers. When have you ever heard someone say, “I love going to the widget shop even though no one was able to help me and they seemed to hate their boss.”
Look, in the not too distant future, all of our jobs are going to be done by (hopefully benevolent) robots. What to do about that is a subject for another column (and an entire government commission). But until then, let’s make retail and service work more humane and more profitable.