Seminars

Most poor families don’t have a full-time worker, and anti-poverty policies often focus on incentivizing parents to work more in order to reduce poverty. While previous research has identified on a variety of reasons that parents are unable to get a full-time job--disability, care responsibilities, poor work prospects due to criminal justice involvement or a high local unemployment rate, etc.--we identify a heretofore undocumented reason: hourly service jobs (a dominant and growing sector for non-college workers) that provide unstable schedules. Using a representative sample of hourly service worker parents, we document that cancelling shifts, sending workers home early, and telling them to come in late are all commonplace practices in these jobs, causing workers to frequently lose expected pay. In addition, calling workers in early or keeping them late, calling workers in at the last minute, and changing workers' schedules from week to week are commonplace, meaning that workers must hold many more hours available for work than they get paid for and making it very difficult to combine multiple jobs. We find that workers have to hold on average 70% more hours available for work than they actually work in a given month, and that doing so drives the effective hourly wage for some subgroups of workers below the federal minimum. Holding more hours available lowers the probability of having a second job and lowers the likelihood that a worker's child is enrolled in formal child care or Head Start.