Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Jobs in the service sector in the United States are precarious. Existing research documents the macro-level fundamental causes of this precarity. We show how exposure to one dimension of precarious work can heighten vulnerability to other aspects of precarious employment, propagating employment disadvantage at a micro-level. We draw on new panel data collected as part of The Shift Project to examine how exposure to precarious scheduling affects job turnover, and the mediating pathways that connect these two dimensions of precarious employment. Our sample includes 1,800 workers who are paid by the hour and employed in the retail and food service sectors in the United States. We find that precarious scheduling, including short advance notice and on-call shifts, significantly increases job turnover and that these associations are partly mediated by work-life conflict and job dissatisfaction. We also find that this job turnover is associated with downward mobility in earnings. Our results show how exposure to precarious work can trigger a process of cumulative disadvantage and constrain intra-generational mobility.