Racial Inequality in Retail Work Scheduling Practices

Background and Purpose

Research consistently demonstrates that Black and Hispanic/Latine workers in low-wage retail jobs in the U.S. are at heightened risk of work schedule precarity, but little is known of how racial disparities are structured into the scheduling process. This paper builds on theories of racialized organizations and racial tasks to explore the mechanisms through which scheduling practices reproduce racial inequality among retail employees.

Methods

As part of a multicomponent organizational case study, we integrate scheduling, payroll, and survey data from part-time employees (n=1288) working in 30 stores of a major apparel retailer. Focusing on a single firm facilitates our ability to identify mechanisms of within-job racial inequality. We organize measures of racialization in work scheduling into the categories of workers’ needs, work hour distribution, schedule control, and last-minute schedule changes to compare distributions across racial-ethnic groups and calculate odds ratios. We chose t-tests, chi-squares, and logistic regressions to assess the statistical significance of racial disparities, rather than multivariate regressions, to avoid controlling for independent variables (e.g., seniority) that are likely influenced by racial bias, although we did use multivariate regressions to confirm the robustness of our findings.

Results

We find that although managers did not schedule white part-time workers for more hours than part-time workers of color, managers were more responsive to white workers’ schedule preferences and protective of their initial assigned schedule. Black and Hispanic workers were more likely than white workers to experience schedule unpredictability and to report wanting to work more (or fulltime) hours as well as not being scheduled for their preferred times and having to engage in hidden labor as they scrambled to adjust schedules after they were posted to meet both their and their manager’s needs.

Conclusions and Implications

Our findings extend theories of racialized organizations from a focus on interorganizational systems to include within-firm and within-job dynamics and the theory of racial tasks to include the schedule management labor disproportionately performed by workers of color. We demonstrate that even among part-time workers in the same job at the same firm, schedule needs are not universal, as many—disproportionately workers of color—would prefer to work full-time. Potential strategies for interrupting the reproduction of racial inequality in retail work scheduling include fair work week legislation, unionization, improving the representation of workers of color among management, and removing barriers to fulltime work.