Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

When I was an undergraduate trying to make every dollar I could to pay my tuition and cover my living costs I worked part time as a cashier in a grocery store chain and in the stockroom of a retail chain. In both of these jobs I was given my schedule a week in advance. Both employers worked around my class schedule and, in part because I was a reliable employee and, in the case of the grocery store, because of the union, I was able to trade hours with other employees to get time off for family events. While I appreciated the relative flexibility of the employers, I was relieved when my earnings as a newly hired teacher combined with my wires earnings meant I could stop working part time.

Today’s part-time employees live in a different world— one where flexibility works for the employer and one where unions have no say whatsoever in the wages and working conditions of employees. As Michele Chen reported in a recent article in Nation, 

Many retail workers are stuck in a segment of the labor force known as “involuntary part-time”: those forced to work fewer than thirty-five hours a week and who would generally otherwise work full-time, but can’t, due to a lack of available jobs.

And these involuntary part-time workers face horrific scheduling for their work. Using scheduling algorithms that optimize the wages paid to employees, corporations employing large numbers of part-time employees– like Walmart, Starbuck, and any number of fast food and retail franchisers– require part-timers to be on call 24/7. The result?

The consequence is not just impoverishment but deepening long-term instability in workers’ family lives and crushing personal stress. As Esther Kaplan points out, low-wage workers face intense pressure to adhere to unstable schedules and to ramp up speed and productivity at the same time—no time to schedule daycare, but always on-call to take a last-minute night-shift.

This plays out in schools in having fewer parents available for scheduled parent conferences, more parents scrambling at the last minute to send their children off to school with proper attire and completed homework assignments, and lots of stress in the homes of children whose parents are often working more than one of these involuntary part-time jobs to make ends meet.

Walmart and Starbucks received lots of relatively favorable coverage when they unilaterally decided to raise wages, but, as Chen notes, more is needed:

An extra dollar-an-hour for impoverished Walmart associates helps, but they want good jobs, equitable schedules and real control over their labor, not just higher wages. Countless workers are still forced to take whatever they can get—which is often simply whatever the boss is willing to give them.

Shareholders want profits which means they want to impose flexible hours on employees more than they want to empower employees to arrange flexible work hours among themselves and to have the flexibility to schedule doctors appointments for their children… let alone volunteer in their child’s school or coach their child’s little league team. Those making decisions about which scheduling algorithm is the most cost effective for the company need to look at what algorithms are most effective for the well being of their employees and see that the two are, in some cases, mutually exclusive. If we want strong communities and a stable work force, increasing the minimum wage only gets us part way there.