Precarious Work Schedules and Financial Insecurity

Introduction. Employer scheduling practices are part of a broader societal transformation in which a growing proportion of economic risk is shouldered by individuals and families rather than firms and government.  Frontline managers have adopted flexible scheduling practices, facilitating their ability to meet firm’s accountability requirements that restrict outlays for labor. These practices structure instability and unpredictability into work and personal lives. We consider the prevalence of precarious work schedules in the US (RQ1), whether precarity lessens with workers age (RQ2), and explore the contribution of precarious work schedules to financial insecurity (RQ3).

Methods. We analyze the 2016 General Social Survey, a cross-sectional survey of US adults aged 18 years or older; we weight variables to improve representativeness. In 2016, GSS incorporated the Fluctuating Work Hours Module, which provides key scheduling variables (work hour volatility, control over work hours, and advance schedule notice), as well as demographic controls and dependent variables indicating perceived financial insecurity (financial dissatisfaction, financial wellbeing relative to others in US, and financial wellbeing relative to parents). We report descriptive statistics by demographic correlates and then estimate a series of logistic regressions estimating the log odds of each measure of financial insecurity as a function of the independent variables, controlling for demographics.

Results. (RQ1) Two-fifths of hourly and one-third of salaried workers report one week or less advance notice of schedules, almost one-half of hourly and one-third of salaried workers report that employers entirely decide the number of hours worked each week, and for both hourly and salaried workers, hours are volatile, varying by one-third of usual weekly hours in a month. There are several gender, race/ethic, and age differences in prevalence discussed in the paper; but importantly, (RQ2) there is no evidence that work schedules get less precarious with age. (RQ3) Logistic regressions indicate that work hour volatility is related to financial insecurity as indicated by all three dependent measures, for salaried workers only. Alone, neither control over hours nor advance schedule notice is related to financial insecurity; however, for both hourly and salaried workers, the combined effect of volatility and limited work hour control is related to a greater odds of believing that one’s future living standard will not improve.  Moreover, the combined effect of volatility and limited advance notice is related to a greater odds of financial dissatisfaction for hourly workers, and perceiving one’s own standard of living as worse than one’s parents and will not get better in the future for salaried, but not hourly workers. These results are associational.

Implications. No other nationally representative US survey asks about control over the number of hours, or allows for the examination of control over hours together with advance schedule notice and hour volatility. This is also the only US survey that includes the full range of working-age adults, allowing for a test of the “aging out hypothesis,” which was not supported. We discuss possible mechanisms to explain findings that show the relationships between precarious work and financial insecurity are distinct for hourly and salaried workers.