Work Hour Instability, Underemployment, and Families' Economic Well-Being

Abstract:

Intro: In 2024, the vast majority of households with children are headed by at least one working parent. However, research finds that low-wage jobs don’t always provide the wages and hours that allow workers to accommodate family needs. In this paper, I investigate associations between parents’ economic hardship and two dimensions of precarious work: involuntary part-time work and unstable work hours: schedules with varying, and often unpredictable, hours and shifts. Existing research finds that workers who are under-employed, and/or have unstable work schedules, are more likely to experience economic hardship. This may create additional hardship for working parents with young children, who face greater constraints on their time; they may be less able to pick up shifts, find a second job, or engage in other strategies to help make ends meet. This project asks two questions: first, are underemployed workers and workers with unstable work schedules more likely to experience economic hardship? Second, how does this relationship change when workers have childcare responsibilities?

Methods: This paper uses the 1996-2020 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The sample includes 329,692 workers who received income from their primary job and have work schedule data for at least one month of observation. Measures of income poverty (i.e. household income below 100% of the Federal Poverty Line) and material hardship were regressed on indicators of whether a workers’ hours changed for a an involuntary reason ( “requirement of the job,” “could not get another job,” or “other involuntary reason”) and involuntary part-time work: when workers self-report working less than 35 hours because they “could not find a full-time job”, or there was “slack work/materials shortage.” Material hardship is separated into dimensions of fiscal hardship, housing hardship, and food insecurity. Regressions use person-year level data with person, state, and year fixed effects to eliminate time-invariant confounders. They also control for a host of demographic and occupation-related characteristics. These analyses are shown for a sample of all workers, and a sample of workers with children under 12, and a sample of workers with children under 6.

Results: My preliminary results suggest that, among all workers in the sample, working part-time for economic reasons or experiencing monthly work-hour changes is associated with an increased likelihood of food insecurity, income poverty, and difficulty covering housing or utility bills. The magnitude of these associations is larger for parents with children under the age of 6 and 12, though the coefficients corresponding with material hardship are not statistically significant at p<0.05.

Conclusion: These findings underscore the importance of work-time for families’ economic well-being. They shed light on potential areas of intervention where policies or practitioners could support families’ capacities to balance work and caregiving obligations.