Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Unpredictable schedules and involuntary part-time work have increasingly come to characterize low-wage service sector jobs, particularly in retail and food services.  While the public, press, and policy makers are increasingly aware of these practices, there have been very few successful efforts regulate employer scheduling practices.  The lone exception is the San Francisco Retail Workers’ Bill of Rights, passed in 2014 and implemented in 2015.  We reported on a set of 35 in-depth interviews with working parents, employed in retail or service industries in the San Francisco Bay area, conducted just before this law went into effect.  

We describe the routine challenges they faced owing to insufficient work hours, volatile incomes, unpredictable schedules, and the lack of flexibility for time off. Involuntary part-time work was a particularly common complaint. Many low-wage employers expected parents to be “ideal workers,” unfettered by parental responsibilities and with open availability. Meeting this expectation while fulfilling parental responsibilities was a difficult challenge.

A prevalent theme in the interviews was the catch-22 these parents faced in trying to meet their parental responsibilities: On the one hand, financial obligations to children created an imperative to soldier on at jobs with schedules that were far from ideal. On the other hand, fulfilling the financial obligation to children often entailed working non-standard schedules and came at the expense of spending time with children, which parents identified as central to being a good parent.

Strategies for coping with precarious work often included relying on support from parents and partners and from public assistance. Working parents with a robust safety net of family and public support were doing markedly better materially and psychologically than their counterparts without these supports. Working parents coped psychologically with the struggles of precarious work by rationalizing sacrifices as their parental duty and for the greater good of their children. With rare exceptions parents acquiesced to their work conditions, posing little resistance to precarious schedules, because they felt they had no other choice. 

Our results provide a richly textured description of a key mechanism – family life and parenting – by which economic inequality in the labor market experiences of adults may have intergenerational effects.