And about half of workers said their bosses would change their hours without their consent. “When workers need something to change, they are told that the system can’t change it.”Ī survey of NYC retail workers conducted in 2011 by the Retail Action Project found that 71 percent of workers said their hours fluctuated week to week. “What we see is that workers are being used as a variable cost and workers have no choice,” says Sasha Hammad, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, a labor organizing group in New York that’s working to change part-time employment laws.
#Shift exchange software software#
But now management functions have been turned over to software that’s designed to treat workers’ hours as a particularly free variable in a cash flow equation. When managers made schedules with a pen and paper, schedules tended to be fixed-making 11th hour shift changes was as much of a pain for a manager as it was for their workers. Now, workers’ schedules are more likely to be “part time and extraordinarily unstable.”
#Shift exchange software full#
“Twenty-five years ago, working in retail had stable and typically full time schedules,” Williams says.
In March, there were over 7.4 million involuntary part-time workers, compared to 4.3 million the same time in 2007, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Since 2007, the number of "involuntary" part-time workers has nearly doubled. And while these jobs have helped drive down overall unemployment rates below 7 percent, many part-time workers would rather be working full time. Part-time work has grown quickly since the recession-much faster than full-time employment. “If the job had been what I thought it was, we would be in a different place,” Clark says. She and her daughter have had to move in with her parents in East Harlem, and she relies on them to help get her daughter to daycare. Though she makes $14 an hour, more than $3 above the average American retail sales wage, without a full-time schedule, her position doesn’t provide enough to pay rent. But since she started in May of last year, she says, the hours have become increasingly uncertain. Since 2007, the number of "involuntary" part-time workers has nearly doubled.Ĭlark, who has a college degree in English and prides herself on her creative instinct, had hoped that her job as a “visual merchandiser” would help her enter the fashion world and provide opportunities to move up. “But it turns out algorithms are algorithms, not reality.” “The algorithms spit out a staffing pattern to perfectly fit the expected demand for workers,” says Joan Williams, who directs the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings. And they argue that companies can actually benefit when they use the software to meet both staffing needs and pay attention to employees’ work-life balance.
But the needs of the workers themselves-for a stable paycheck and reliable hours around which to arrange child care, a second job, and other family and life commitments-are rarely entered into the calculus, experts say.Ī growing group of scholars, advocates for low-wage workers and now business consultants say it’s time for a shift in the way service and hospitality work is scheduled. This “just-in-time scheduling” helps employers piece together a jigsaw puzzle of part-time workers. The algorithms, built on data including last year’s sales trends, economic indicators, changes in weather and political pressures, are intended to create a perfectly predictable schedule and then provide real-time information for managers to make adjustments as these variables change. Using “workforce optimization systems” managers can ensure that stores have exactly the right number of workers, not only by the day, but by the hour. Now these jobs have become increasingly tied to fluctuations in customer traffic. It used to be that retail and hospitality workers were scheduled for standard shifts whether business was busy or slow. Clark is part of a growing segment of the American workforce whose schedules aren’t designed by people but by sophisticated scheduling software programs.
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