Articles

Raphael, Steve, and Daniel Schneider. 2023. “Introduction to The Socioeconomic Impacts of Covid-19.”. The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 9 (3):1-30. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacted a historic toll on Americans’ health and longevity. It has also shaped socioeconomic inequalities along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, nativity, and class in America. The effects of COVID-19 are evident in the stratified experiences of Americans in work, unemployment, and unpaid labor; in stark inequalities in wealth and income; in the historic expansions and retrenchments in social welfare spending; and in the increase in violence and changes in the criminal justice system. While there has been an outpouring of research on the social and economic consequences of COVID-19, far less work draws together research across these varied, but interrelated, domains. In this introduction, we provide a broad narrative of how the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in America and reshaped, in some instances fleetingly and in others more permanently, the landscape of socioeconomic inequality in America.
Woods, Tyler, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett. 2023. “The Politics of Prevention: Polarization in How Workplace COVID-19 Safety Practices Shaped the Well-Being of Frontline Service Sector Workers.”. Work and Occupations 50 (1):130-162. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reshaped the labor market, especially for service sector workers. Frontline service sector workers, already coping with precarious working conditions, faced proximate risks of COVID-19 transmission on the job and navigated new workplace safety measures, including masking, social distancing, and staying home while sick, all in a polarized political environment. We examine polarization in the effects of COVID-19 workplace safety measures on workers’ feelings of safety and well-being. Specifically, we examine how support for former President Trump moderates the relationship between COVID-19 safety practices (masking, social distancing, staying home while sick) and workers’ feelings of safety and well-being. To do so, we draw on novel data collected by The Shift Project from 2,039 service sector workers at 89 large firms during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that workplace safety measures are positively associated with workers’ self-assessments of feeling safe and with mental health, but only for Biden voters.
Brick, Carmen, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett. 2023. “The Gender Wage Gap, Between-Firm Inequality, and Devaluation: Testing a New Hypothesis in the Service Sector”. Work and Occupations 50 (4). Publisher's VersionAbstract
Unequal sorting of men and women into higher and lower-wage firms contributes significantly to the gender wage gap according to recent analysis of national labor markets. We confirm the importance of this between-firm gender segregation in wages and examine a second outcome of hours using unique employer–employee data from the service sector. We then examine what explains the relationship between firm gender composition and wages. In contrast to prevailing economic explanations that trace between-firm differences in wages to differences in firm surplus, we find evidence consistent with devaluation and potentially a gender-specific use of “low road” employment strategies.
Harknett, Kristen, and Daniel Schneider. 2022. “Mandates Narrow Gender Gaps In Paid Sick Leave Coverage For Low-Wage Workers In The US”. Health Affairs 41 (11):1575-1582. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Paid sick leave helps workers recover from illness and manage care obligations and protects public health. Yet access to paid sick leave remains limited and unequal in the United States. Drawing on surveys of 61,223 service-sector workers collected during the period 2017–21 by the Shift Project, we documented limited access to paid sick leave and stark gender inequality, with women less likely than men to have paid sick leave. Part-time employment and gender segregation by industry subsector each explain part, but not all, of the gender disparity. However, in states and localities that mandate paid sick leave for workers, workers are far more likely to report access to this benefit, and the gender gap is eliminated. Guaranteeing paid sick leave to all workers would offer a range of benefits for workers, employers, and public health while also offering the further benefit of reducing gender inequality.
Luhr, Sigrid, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett. 2022. “Parenting Without Predictability: Precarious Schedules, Parental Strain, and Work-Life Conflict.”. The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8 (5):24-44. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Against the backdrop of dramatic changes in work and family life, this article draws on survey data from 2,971 mothers working in the service sector to examine how unpredictable schedules are associated with three dimensions of parenting: difficulty arranging childcare, work-life conflict, and parenting stress. Results demonstrate that on-call shifts, shift timing changes, work hour volatility, and short advance notice of work schedules are positively associated with difficulty arranging childcare and work-life conflict. Mothers working these schedules are more likely to miss work. We consider how family structure and race moderate the relationship between schedule instability and these dimensions of parenting. Unstable work schedules, we argue, have important consequences for mothers working in the service industry.
Abrams, Leah R, Kristen Harknett, and Daniel Schneider. 2022. “Older Workers With Unpredictable Schedules: Implications for Well-Being and Job Retention”. The Gerontologist 62 (10):1443-1453. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Background and Objectives A substantial portion of the service sector workforce is middle-aged or older, but little is known about the scheduling conditions of these older workers. This study describes the quality of work schedules in the service sector by age and tests associations of unpredictable schedules with well-being and job retention among workers ages 50-80. Research Design and Methods The Shift Project collected survey data on detailed working conditions and health from 121,408 service sector workers, recruited in 2017-2020 using social media advertisements. Survey weights aligned sample demographics with the American Community Survey, and multiple imputation addressed missingness. Ordinary least squares regression models were used to examine associations between age and schedule stability, and ordinary least squares, ordinal logit, and logit regression models tested associations between schedule stability and well-being and job retention outcomes for older workers. Results Scheduling conditions were more stable and predictable for older compared to younger workers; however, more than 80% of workers ages 50-80 experienced one or more types of routine schedule instability. Among workers ages 50-80, unpredictable schedules were associated with psychological distress, poor-quality sleep, work-family conflict, economic insecurity, job dissatisfaction, and intentions to look for a new job. Canceled and back-to-back closing and opening ("clopening") shifts were most strongly associated with negative outcomes. Discussion and Implications Policies aimed at improving scheduling conditions hold promise to benefit older service workers’ well-being. As the population ages, improving work schedules in the years approaching retirement may be important to longer working lives.
Amorin, Mariana, and Daniel Schneider. 2022. “Schedule Unpredictability and the Use of High-Cost Financial Services: The Case of Service Workers”. Sociological Science 9 (5):102-135. Publisher's VersionAbstract
High-cost financial services allow economically insecure families to make ends meet but often contribute to additional financial strain in the long run. This study uses novel data from the Shift Project to describe the link between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt (i.e., payday loans, pawnshop loans, auto-title loans, overdrafts, and problematic credit card debt) among service workers. First, it compares the relative magnitude of the associations between high-cost debt, schedule unpredictability, and levels of income. Second, it investigates whether income volatility mediates the relationship between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt. Finally, it describes whether the link between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt varies by institutional and policy contexts. Results indicate that schedule unpredictability is a substantively meaningful, independent, and understudied dimension of inequality in financial outcomes.
Schneider, Daniel, and Margot I. Jackson. 2022. “Public Investments and Class Gaps in Parents’ Developmental Expenditures”. American Sociological Review 87 (1):105-142. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Families and governments are the primary sources of investment in children, providing access to basic resources and other developmental opportunities. Recent research identifies significant class gaps in parental investments that contribute to high levels of inequality by family income and education. State-level public investments in children and families have the potential to reduce class inequality in children’s developmental environments by affecting parents’ behavior. Using newly assembled administrative data from 1998 to 2014, linked to household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we examine how public-sector investment in income support, health, and education is associated with the private expenditures of low- and high-SES parents on developmental items for children. Are class gaps in parental investments in children narrower in contexts of higher public investment for children and families? We find that more generous public spending for children and families is associated with significantly narrower class gaps in private parental investments. Furthermore, we find that equalization is driven by bottom-up increases in low-SES households’ developmental spending in response to progressive state investments of income support and health, and by top-down decreases in high-SES households’ developmental spending in response to universal state investment in public education.
Harknett, Kristen, Daniel Schneider, and Sigrid Luhr. 2022. “Who Cares if Parents have Unpredictable Work Schedules?: Just-in-Time Work Schedules and Child Care Arrangements ”. Social Problems 69 (1):164-183. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Working parents must arrange some type of care for their young children when they are away at work. For parents with unstable and unpredictable work schedules, the logistics of arranging care can be complex. In this paper, we use survey data from the Shift Project, collected in 2017 and 2018 from a sample of 3,653 parents who balance work in the retail and food service sector with parenting young children from infants to nine years of age. Our results demonstrate that unstable and unpredictable work schedules have consequences for children’s care arrangements. We find that parents’ exposure to on-call work and last-minute shift changes are associated with more numerous care arrangements, with a reliance on informal care arrangements, with the use of siblings to provide care, and with young children being left alone without adult supervision. Given the well-established relationship between quality of care in the early years and child development, just-in-time scheduling practices are likely to have consequences for children’s development and safety and to contribute to the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage.
Schneider, Daniel, and Kristen Harknett. 2022. “What’s to Like? Facebook as a Tool for Survey Data Collection”. Sociological Methods and Research 51 (1):108-140. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In this article, we explore the use of Facebook targeted advertisements for the collection of survey data. We illustrate the potential of survey sampling and recruitment on Facebook through the example of building a large employee–employer linked data set as part of The Shift Project. We describe the workflow process of targeting, creating, and purchasing survey recruitment advertisements on Facebook. We address concerns about sample selectivity and apply poststratification weighting techniques to adjust for differences between our sample and that of “gold standard” data sources. We then compare univariate and multivariate relationships in the Shift data against the Current Population Survey and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. Finally, we provide an example of the utility of the firm-level nature of the data by showing how firm-level gender composition is related to wages. We conclude by discussing some important remaining limitations of the Facebook approach, as well as highlighting some unique strengths of the Facebook targeted advertisement approach, including the ability for rapid data collection in response to research opportunities, rich and flexible sample targeting capabilities, and low cost, and we suggest broader applications of this technique.
Schneider, Daniel, and Kristen Harknett. 2022. “Maternal Exposure to work schedule unpredictability and child behavior ”. Journal of Marriage and Family 84 (1):187-209. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Objective

This article estimates the association between maternal exposure to unpredictable work schedules in the service sector and child internalizing and externalizing behavior.

Background

Precarious work is widespread and characterized by low wages, few benefits, and nonstandard schedules. But working parents, especially in the service sector, contend with unpredictable work schedules as well. These schedules have negative consequences for workers, but may also perpetuate inequality across generations by negatively affecting children.

Method

This article takes advantage of novel survey data from The Shift Project, covering 2,613 mothers (surveyed 2017–2019) working in the service sector with children (mean child age of 7.5), to examine the association between maternal work schedules and child behavior as well as the mediators of this relationship.

Results

Maternal exposure to unpredictable work schedules is associated with children's externalizing and internalizing behavior. Mediation analysis shows that for parents with the most unpredictable schedules, this aspect of job quality operates on children's behavior by increasing household economic insecurity, reducing developmental parenting time, and diminishing maternal well-being.

Conclusion

These results demonstrate that work scheduling conditions may have consequences not just for workers themselves but also for their children.

Choper, Joshua, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett. 2021. “Uncertain Time: Precarious Schedules and Job Turnover in the US Service Sector”. Industrial & labor relations review. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The authors develop a model of cumulative disadvantage relating three axes of disadvantage for hourly workers in the US retail and food service sectors: schedule instability, turnover, and earnings. In this model, exposure to unstable work schedules disrupts workers’ family and economic lives, straining the employment relation and increasing the likelihood of turnover, which can then lead to earnings losses. Drawing on new panel data from 1,827 hourly workers in retail and food service collected as part of the Shift Project, the authors demonstrate that exposure to schedule instability is a strong, robust predictor of turnover for workers with relatively unstable schedules (about one-third of the sample). Slightly less than half of this relationship is mediated by job satisfaction and another quarter by work–family conflict. Job turnover is generally associated with earnings losses due to unemployment, but workers leaving jobs with moderately unstable schedules experience earnings growth upon re-employment.
Schneider, Daniel, Kristen Harknett, and Veronique Irwin. 2021. “Evaluating the Impacts of the Seattle Secure Scheduling Ordinance”. Department of Labor, Labor Research and Evaluation Grants. Publisher's VersionAbstract
To evaluate the impacts of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling legislation on the work schedule experiences of Seattle workers, we surveyed a set of workers paid by the hour and employed at businesses covered by the Secure Scheduling Ordinance. We collected pre-implementation, baseline survey data from Seattle workers in the Spring of 2017. We then collected follow-up survey data from Seattle workers between Fall of 2017 and Spring of 2018, after the law had gone into effect. For the short-term follow-up period covered in this report, our goal was to generate rigorous estimates of the impacts of the Secure Scheduling Ordinance on workers’ reports of their work schedules. To accomplish this goal, it is essential to understand how work schedules might have changed over time even in the absence of the Secure Scheduling Ordinance. Therefore, we also collected survey data from workers employed by the same set of businesses in comparison cities that did not have any scheduling regulations in place. The data from comparison cities provides the best available gauge of whether and how scheduling conditions would have changed in the absence of the Seattle ordinance, and allow us to isolate any effects of the law from general trends in work schedules unrelated to the law. This report describes the experiences of 755 Seattle workers before the Secure Scheduling Ordinance took effect as well as the experiences of 624 Seattle workers after the Secure Scheduling Ordinance was in place for a short period. We compare the experiences of Seattle workers to that of 5,402 workers in comparison cities in the baseline period and 7,328 workers in comparison cities in the follow-up period. We use this survey data to estimate the impact that the Secure Scheduling Ordinance had on several dimensions of the work schedule experiences reported by the workers themselves.
Schneider, Daniel, and Julia M Goodman. 2021. “The association of paid medical and caregiving leave with the economic security and wellbeing of service sector workers”. BMC Public Health 21. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Background

Service-sector workers in the U.S. face extremely limited access to paid family and medical leave, but little research has examined the consequences for worker wellbeing. Our objective was to determine whether paid leave was associated with improved economic security and wellbeing for workers who needed leave for their own serious health condition or to care for a seriously ill loved one.

Methods

We analyzed data collected in 2020 by the Shift Project from 11,689 hourly service-sector workers across the US. We estimated the impact of taking paid leave on economic insecurity and wellbeing relative to taking unpaid leave, no leave, or not experiencing a need to take leave.

Results

Twenty percent of workers needed medical or caregiving leave in the reference period. Workers who took paid leave reported significantly less difficulty making ends meet, less hunger and utility payment hardship, and better sleep quality than those who had similar serious health or caregiving needs but did not take paid leave.

Conclusions

Access to paid leave enables front line workers to take needed leave from work while maintaining their financial security and wellbeing.

Schneider, Daniel, Kristen Harknett, and Elmer Vivas-Portillo. 2021. “Olive Garden’s Expansion Of Paid Sick Leave During COVID-19 Reduced The Share Of Employees Working While Sick”. Health Affairs 40 (8):1328-1336. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has focused public and policy attention on the acute lack of paid sick leave for service-sector workers in the United States. The lack of paid sick leave is potentially a threat not only to workers’ well-being but also to public health. However, the literature on the effects of paid sick leave in the US is surprisingly limited, in large part because instances of paid sick leave expansion are relatively uncommon. We exploit the fact that large firms in the US were not required to expand paid sick leave during the COVID-19 pandemic but that one casual dining restaurant in particular, Olive Garden, faced intense public pressure to do so. We drew on data collected from 2017 through fall 2020 from 10,306 food service–sector workers in the US by the Shift Project, which include employer identifiers. Using a difference-in-differences design, we found strong evidence of an increase in paid sick leave coverage among Olive Garden workers, as well as evidence that this expansion reduced the incidence of working while sick among front-line food service workers.
LaBriola, Joe, and Daniel Schneider. 2021. “Class Inequality in Parental Childcare Time: Evidence from Synthetic Couples in the ATUS”. Social Forces 100 (2):680-705. Publisher's VersionAbstract
The time that parents spend teaching and playing with their young children has important consequences for later life achievement and attainment. Previous research suggests that there are significant class inequalities in how much time parents devote to this kind of developmental childcare in the United States. Yet, due in part to data limitations, prior research has not accounted for how class inequalities in family structure, assortative mating, and specialization between partners may exacerbate or ameliorate these gaps. We match parental respondents within the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to generate synthetic parental dyads, which we use to estimate, in turn, the contributions of family structure, assortative mating, and specialization to class gaps in parental time spent in developmental care of children aged 0–6. We find some evidence that accounting for class differences in family structure widens income gaps in total parental time in developmental childcare of young children. Further, we show that assortative mating of parents widens educational gaps in developmental childcare, whereas specialization between partners marginally widens these class divides. Although the net effect of these three processes on income-based gaps in childcare time is modest, accounting for these three processes more than doubles education-based gaps in total parental developmental childcare as compared to maternal time alone. Our findings from this novel empirical approach provide a more holistic view of the extent and sources of inequality in parental time investments in young children’s cognitive and social development.
Hastings, Orestes, and Daniel Schneider. 2021. “Family Structure and Financial Investments in Children: Commitment and Resources”. Journal of Marriage and Family 83 (3):717-736. Publisher's VersionAbstract
This study examines family structure differences in parents' financial investments in children. Background Family structure in the United States is undergoing important change and continued stratification with increases in single parenting and cohabiting unions. These transformations in family demography have important implications for social mobility as theory and empirical research suggest family structure plays an important role in shaping children's life chances, in part through the differential financial investments that parents make for their children's development. Method Drawing from the 2003–2018 Consumer Expenditure Surveys, this study examined differences by family structure in parental financial investments in children's childcare, schooling, and enrichment activities using data on 44,930 households in 123,862 household-quarters. The study compared differences between married, cohabiting, and single parents, and it tested the extent to which disparities in economic resources account for associations between family structure and financial investments in children. Results Single and cohabiting parents made smaller financial investments in children than married parents. Income explained the entire difference for single parents but about 60% of the gap for cohabiting parents. These gaps in expenditures by family structure were smallest among Hispanic households and largest among highly educated households. Conclusion This study shows that family structure is a source of familial inequalities in parental investments in children. Explanations for the lower levels of investment (compared with married parents) are different between single and cohabiting parents, which has implications for how to reduce these inequalities
Storer, Adam, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett. 2020. “What Explains Race/Ethnic Inequality in Job Quality in the Service Sector? ”. American Sociological Review 85 (4):537-572. Publisher's VersionAbstract
White workers experience significant advantages in the labor market both in hiring and in compensation compared to their non-white peers. Human capital differences and occupational segregation are commonly offered as partial explanations for these racial inequalities. To further explain the gap, some scholars have pointed toward firm and intra-organizational dynamics, yet such inquires have been constrained by a lack of suitable data. The lack of data has also precluded an examination of key aspects of job quality beyond wages and benefits, in particular exposure to precarious scheduling practices. We draw on innovative matched employer-employee data from The Shift Project to estimate race/ethnic gaps in these temporal dimensions of job quality and examine the contribution of firm-level sorting and intra-organizational dynamics to these gaps. Results from regression and decomposition analyses show significant race/ethnic gaps in exposure to precarious scheduling that disadvantage non-white workers. Going beyond standard explanations such as human capital differences, we provide novel evidence that both firm segregation and racial discordance between workers and managers play significant roles in explaining race/ethnic gaps in job quality, though a portion of the gap remains unexplained. Notably, we find that race/ethnic gaps are larger but more explicable for women than for men.
Harknett, Kristen, Daniel Schneider, and Rebecca Wolfe. 2020. “Losing Sleep over Work Scheduling? The Relationship between Work Schedules and Sleep Quality for Service Sector Workers”. SSM Population Health 12. Publisher's VersionAbstract
In the retail and food service sectors, work schedules change from day-to-day and week-to-week, often with little advance notice, posing a potential impediment to healthy sleep patterns. In this article, we use data from the Shift Project collected in 2018 and 2019 for a sample of over 16,000 hourly workers employed in the service sector to examine relationships between unstable and unpredictable work schedules and sleep quality. We extend prior research on shift work and sleep disruption, which has often focused on the health care sector, to the retail and food service sector, which comprises nearly 20 percent of jobs in the U.S. We find that the unstable and unpredictable schedules that are typical in the service sector are associated with poor sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, waking during sleep, and waking up feeling tired. As a benchmark, we compare unstable and unpredictable work schedules with two well-known predictors of sleep quality – having a young child and working the night shift. The strength of the associations between most types of unstable and unpredictable work schedules and sleep quality are stronger than those of having a pre-school aged child or working a regular night shift. Chronic uncertainty about the timing of work shifts appears to have a pernicious influence on sleep quality, and, given its prevalence for low-wage workers, potentially contributes to stark health inequalities by socioeconomic status.
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