ABSTRACT: Millions of economically precarious U.S. workers live at the beck and call of their employers. In retail and food service industries, low wages and insufficient work hours relegate workers to a life on call, perpetually at risk of being added to or dropped from constantly changing work schedules. This talk weaves together in-depth interviews with original survey data from over 100,000 service sector workers to paint a portrait of dehumanized scheduling, in which employers assign schedules with little regard for human needs for rest, consistency, or advance notice to allow for planning. I discuss the forces perpetuating these precarious working conditions and the grassroots and legislative efforts to rein them in. I present rigorous evidence on how fair workweek legislation affected work scheduling practices and worker wellbeing, and discuss why these laws fall short of eliminating precarious scheduling practices.
