Abstract:

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.

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