Dynamic Scheduling Fails Companies and Workers

For many across the US, work schedules are a painful unknown. It’s not uncommon for workers in retail, restaurants and hospitality to get notice of an upcoming shift just weeks or even days before they’re due to report to work.

The issue of unpredictable work shifts has been a sticking point in labor talks between railway operators and their workers over the past year as they negotiated new contract terms to increase pay and improve their quality of life. Congress intervened last week to force a deal that increases salaries and adds an extra paid day off. Left undecided are demands over shift scheduling, which will be hammered out in continuing talks, backed by the threat of binding arbitration.

It’s unclear where these discussions will land. But a forced examination of unpredictable scheduling across the railroad industry will spotlight a labor practice that should have ended years ago.

Much of the service industry depended on what’s sometimes called dynamic scheduling or on-call scheduling until news stories in 2014 shed light on the chaos and economic instability it brought to workers’ lives. Six local governments and Oregon adopted laws regulating employer scheduling the following year after a public uproar about the use of software to program shifts at companies including Starbucks Corp and Victoria’s Secret. Victoria’s Secret paid $12 million to settle a class action lawsuit in California that alleged the company owed more than 43,000 workers pay for times they were required to call their stores to see if they should report to work and were told to stay home. Starbucks said at the time that it didn’t use on-call scheduling and required store managers to schedule partners with at least eight hours between closing and opening shifts.

But the practice never really went away.

Nearly two-thirds of workers surveyed by The Shift Project last fall received less than two weeks’ notice of their work schedule, unchanged from the period prior to the pandemic. More than a third got just a week’s notice and a quarter had as little as 72 hours to prepare, according to a report produced by faculty from the Harvard Kennedy School and University of California, San Francisco, who collated data from workers at the largest service sector firms. That’s a significant burden for the 43 million Americans working in retail, hospitality and restaurants.

Without a predictable schedule, employees struggle to coordinate a second job or school pick-ups, let alone childcare or medical appointments. They also face income volatility, making it difficult to pay bills or put away savings for an emergency. Three in 10 adults in the US said their family income varied from month to month, according to a 2020 Federal Reserve report. Workers in the construction or leisure and hospitality industries reported higher rates of inconsistent monthly income.