Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Qualitative Studies of Local Labor Regulations

(Poverty and Income Policy)

Over the past five years, public concern over economic inequality and job quality has reached a fever pitch. Social movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Fight for Fifteen have put issues such as rising income inequality, a stagnant minimum wage, and fair scheduling on the policy agenda. Though federal policy makers have taken few steps to respond to these demands, there has been substantial action at the state and local level. These changes – increases to the minimum wage and efforts to stabilize work schedules – have been prominent in the news cycle and in the Presidential campaigns. The proposed panel directly addresses these recent changes to state and local labor laws. All three papers take a qualitative approach to assessing the implications of these laws for workers and their families. The first paper focuses on minimum wage increases in Oakland, CA and Chicago, IL. This work shows how minimum wage increases in the restaurant industry were shaped by beliefs about worth and value, leading to changes that were widespread but differed from restaurant to restaurant. The second paper presents qualitative data from a larger evaluation of the Seattle minimum wage increase. The authors draw on a longitudinal, qualitative study of workers making less than $15/hour to show that workers support the principles behind the minimum wage law in Seattle, but hold little hope of the law fundamentally improving their financial circumstances. Wages are an important element of job quality, but other local laws have sought to affect other aspects of low-wage work. The third paper draws on qualitative interviews with working parents in the San Francisco Bay Area to examine how legislated changes to employer scheduling practices affect family life. Drawing on 35 interviews with parents working low-wage jobs with unpredictable hours in retail, the authors show how workers perceive unpredictable work schedules as having profound effects on their lives and then detail the multiple coping strategies that workers use to deal with this “predictable uncertainty.” In all, the papers examine a vitally important and currently active area of policymaking. While quantitative studies that provide causal identification of the effects of these legislative changes will be important, this panel goes beyond traditional approaches to use rigorous qualitative methods to understanding the meanings of these changes to labor practices to the workers at the heart of new labor regulation.