When the labor shortage eases, the benefit could disappear, says Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Without fair scheduling practices workers cannot plan their lives, take care of their children or elderly parents, take a necessary second job or seek additional training or courses to advance their careers.”Ī number of cities including San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City have established scheduling laws with universal standards for scheduling hourly workers in industries like retail, food service, and hospitality.

“The rise of this practice is just the latest cover for long-standing scheduling issues which leave workers in precarious positions. “Flexibility is a buzzword, which really means last minute scheduling and unpredictable lives for low-wage earners,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, in an email to Quartz. The pandemic forced wider adoption.īut, given how companies have used them in the past, some are still skeptical of the updated scheduling practices. The systems have gotten more sophisticated by integrating with software like Slack and Facebook Messenger to make communication more seamless, says Jayson Saba, a senior director of product management at UKG, a global HR and workforce management company. Their resentment forced the coffee chain to make their scheduling practices more employee-friendly, such as by preventing managers from booking employees to work shifts with less than eight hours in between.

In 2014, Starbucks baristas voiced objections to a system that forced them to work shifts with only a few hours break between them. That led to workers feeling like they have no control over their schedule. Scheduling software focused on boosting company’s revenues, such as Walmart’s in 2007, which moved workers from predictable hours to when there was customer demand.

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