Over the years, many employers, especially retailers, have moved away from reliable, fixed schedules where workers have the same hours every week. The initial reason was to meet demand – when there are lots of customers in a store, you need lots of workers to serve them, but when the store is almost empty, paying a lot of staff to stand around simply hurts the bottom line.
But variable work schedules have gone well beyond simply matching staffing levels to customer numbers. Companies realized they could eke out improvements to their bottom lines by keeping low-paid, insecure workers on call. Some workers are inexplicably not given hours for an entire week. When others request scheduling changes, they are answered with dramatic cuts in their hours. Still others have on-call scheduling, where they are forced to sit by the phone waiting to see if they’ll be given paid work.
This sort of insecure scheduling, which now applies to about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce, hurts workers in several ways. First, being on call constrains a worker’s unpaid hours, preventing them from getting another job, completing various types of chores, managing child care or enjoying many leisure activities. Second, income uncertainty makes it harder for people to plan their consumption and save money.
Democratic legislators have been pushing for a fix. Their bill would set minimum weekly hours, require two weeks’ notification of scheduling changes and ban employers from retaliating against workers who request different schedules. But the effort is sure to see pushback from retailers, who will claim the proposed regulations will hurt their profits.
In 2015, an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by University of California Hastings legal scholar Joan C. Williams conducted an experiment with Gap Inc. to see how more regular scheduling would really affect a retailer. Their results demonstrated that if done right, established schedules aren’t just good for workers but for corporate profits as well.
After a seven-month pilot study at three stores, Gap decided it would eliminate on-call scheduling and implement two weeks’ notice for changes to working hours at all its stores. The full experiment, which included 28 stores and ran for nine months, went further. At those stores, workers were given an app that let them swap shifts without manager approval and allowed managers to post new shifts as the need arose. Core employees were offered a soft guarantee of 20 hours a week.
The changes had multiple positive effects – not just for the workers but for managers and for the company. The workers who received the soft guarantee of 20 hours a week saw this promise honored, and their extra hours didn’t come at the expense of other employees. All employees saw the consistency of their hours increase. This didn’t hurt sales or productivity – it led to increases. The median store where the experiment was carried out saw a 7 percent increase in sales and generated an additional $6.20 of revenue per hour per employee.
Why did these stores make money instead of lose money? Any lost flexibility from consistent scheduling was more than made up for by other factors. One of these was reduced turnover costs – more consistent hours meant fewer employees quit, reducing the need to spend money hiring and training new people. Also, surveys indicated morale improved at the stores – happier workers tend to be more productive. Finally, managers simply wasted less time planning schedules, allowing them to do more important work.
In an age of big ideas, regular work scheduling may not seem Earth-shattering, but it’s a low-cost way to make the lives of the nation’s precarious service-worker class a lot less painful.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
