Scheduling for Compliance or Subversion? Regulatory, Firm, and Manager Influences on the Eve of Implementation of New Work Hour Standards

Background/Purpose: “Fair workweek” legislation, designed to curb employers’ “just-in-time” scheduling practices that disrupt hourly workers’ economic and work-family wellbeing, is gaining momentum across the country. Major US cities and states have passed new work hour standards, targeting primarily the retail and food service sectors, and many others have pending scheduling legislation. American firms’ well-documented use of “labor flexibility” practices to contain labor costs, however, combined with other institutional factors shaping manager practices in these industries, raise concerns that simply passing these laws may be insufficient to ensure its effective implementation in practice. Based on an ongoing evaluation of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance, this paper presents analyses of scheduling policies and practices used by frontline managers at Seattle sites of major US retail and food service chains just before the Ordinance was enacted in July 2017. We address three research questions: Q1) How far were managers’ pre-Ordinance practices from legal compliance with the provisions of the Ordinance, and how is this gap related to firms’ reliance on labor flexibility practices?; Q2) How well did managers understand the Ordinance and what supports did they receive for implementation?; and RQ3) What were managers’ anticipated strategies for achieving compliance?

Methods: Utilizing a comparative organizational case study method (Yin, 2014), we sampled 28 retail, 16 fast food, and 8 full-service restaurant sites covered by the Ordinance, stratifying the sample by neighborhood, store footprint, and market niche. Data come from surveys and in-depth interviews with 52 managers who schedule workers, as well as interviews with other stakeholders from the broader institutional environment. Interviews were coded using the Dedoose program for both a priori and emergent themes.

Results: Our analyses highlight some of the challenges created by the complexity of Seattle’s law in the context of wide variability in firms’ reliance on labor flexibility (Q1), further complicated by an unevenness in both available supports for managers to comply with the ordinance and understanding of the ordinance’s provisions (Q2). Regarding Q1, we found some businesses rely relatively little on labor flexibility, and in turn were close to Ordinance compliance by the time of our interviews. Others had further to go to comply, but alignment appeared to be a matter of small adjustments to practice. For a final group, labor flexibility was central to the business model, and achieving compliance will require dramatic transformation of operations. We also observed widespread misunderstanding of the law, leading some managers to anticipate changing compliant practices and others to foresee continuing practices in legal violation; further, their access to implementation resources varied substantially (Q2 & 3). These findings suggest that implementation will be uneven for some time.

Conclusions and Implications: This paper follows the social work tradition of illuminating how policy from the upper levels works its way down to the frontlines of organizations and communities, producing variable effects for policy stakeholders, in this case for vulnerable workers. Our paper discusses steps cities might take to facilitate implementation so that the work hour standards defined on paper are delivered to workers in practice.