Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Workplace relationships can be an important source of support and resources for employees, with implications for wellbeing outside of the workplace, and for both individual and organizational outcomes within a workplace. Workplace relationships can also be channels through which workers might identify common grievances, form workplace solidarity, and engage in collective action against firm management. One assumption of research on low-wage, precarious work is that such work undermines the bases for social connection among employees in a workplace. However, this assumption has not been empirically examined. Does temporal instability in work schedules make low-wage employees more isolated at their jobs, because they do not have enough regular contact with others to form workplace ties? Or, conversely, does temporal instability in work schedules create new opportunities for workplace relationships by introducing employees to a wider variety of co-workers and forcing them to rely on one another to respond to scheduling uncertainty? We use Blau’s (1977) theoretical work, which argues that relationships are more likely to form when individuals have repeated opportunities for interaction under favorable conditions, to formulate propositions about how different aspects of temporal instability relate to opportunities for interaction and favorable conditions for interaction. We focus on understanding the association between temporal instability and three types of co-worker relationships: talking about personal issues (affective), asking for help with personal things (personal instrumental), and asking for help with work-related (work instrumental). Affective and instrumental relationships are conceptually distinct, both in how they are experienced and in terms their effects on workplace behavior (Reich and Bearman 2018).

In order to establish the relational consequences of the temporal instability that is increasingly common in many types of low-wage work, we use a unique dataset of retail employees from across the United States collected as part of the Shift Project (Schneider and Harknett 2019). Based on survey information about workplace relationships from over 9,000 retail employees, we find that many forms of temporal instability are indeed associated with fewer workplace relationships. Of the seven different measures of schedule instability available from respondents, we find that receiving less than two weeks of advanced notice, experiencing a shift cancellation, working on-call, and lacking control over one’s schedule are all associated with reporting fewer workplace relationships (both the three types of relationships independently and the combined measure). Two other types of temporal instability, hour volatility and clopenings, are not associated with the number of workplace relationships. Finally, all else equal, having a varying schedule compared to a regular schedule is associated with having more workplace relationships. We highlight the distinction between an employee lacking control over their schedule and having a varying schedule. While the former is strongly associated with fewer workplace ties, the latter is associated with more workplace ties. This, we argue, presents new opportunities for research and may open up new avenues for workplace collective action. We close with preliminary evidence regarding the relationship between workplace relationships and collective action.