Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Work-family conflict for women in high-wage and professional jobs has been thoroughly documented over the past decade (Boushey, 2016). Less understood are the issues workers in low-skill and service-based occupations face, many of whom are low-income women. Women in professional jobs often struggle to balance the hours and task demands of their employers with the needs of their family; work-family policy goals, in turn, reflect the needs of these workers by advocating for flexible hours and days worked, child care in business centers and the ability to telecommute. However, these goals may not square up with the needs of low-wage workers, whose employment in occupations like food service and child care, cannot be done remotely or on their own time. Recent research on service sector jobs have found that key aspects of these jobs, such as work schedules and employee-employer relationships, are increasingly unstable, irregular and unpredictable (Henly and Lambert, 2014; Kalleberg, 2009). The precarious nature of this work may lead to work-family challenges and policy goals for low-income families that differ from their professional counterparts.

This paper examines how working parents in low paying jobs perceive and talk about work-family fit over the course of three years. Using data drawn from three waves of in-depth interviews with 47 workers living in Seattle, Washington, we contribute to a large body of research on work-family fit by focusing on the perspective of low-wage workers. We investigate how workers in low-wage jobs talk about the work-family interface, what aspects of workers’ low-wage jobs work or do not work for families, and whether there are differences in perceptions of the work-family interface by occupation or immigration status. We find that workers emphasize four dimensions of work-family fit—work-schedule fit, time adequacy, earnings and benefit adequacy, and work spillover—which occur in tandem to challenge and benefit their relationships with their family. Critically, these dimensions of work-family fit often come as trade-offs to one another, leaving workers with tough choices to fulfill their roles as worker and parent as successfully as they would like.

We contribute a valuable perspective to the work-family conflict policy discussion in two key ways. First, our focus on low-wage workers highlights salient issues in the domains of work and family for an understudied population. Second, we provide a lens for which policymakers can view the effects of irregular and unstable work on workers’ families. Unique to our analysis is the use of longitudinal qualitative interview data. This allows us to view workers’ employment and schedules changes in the context of their family life in the hope of informing policy aimed at improving the social welfare of low-wage workers.