By Tony Ditta
Daniel Schneider is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Sociology at FAS. His research has covered class inequality in parenting, the role of economic resources in marriage, divorce, and fertility, the effects of the Great Recession, and the scope of household financial fragility. As Co-Director of The Shift Project, his current research focuses on how precarious and unpredictable work schedules affects household economic security and worker and family health and wellbeing.
Nearly 20% of Americans work service sector jobs like retail and food service, but researchers know surprisingly little about their day-to-day working conditions. Daniel Schneider’s work with The Shift Project aims to fill in this gap. Beginning in 2016, they have surveyed hundreds of thousands of service sector workers about what they want from their jobs and what they’re getting.
Typically, researchers and policymakers have a pretty simple view of work: do people have jobs and how much are they paid? Employment and wages are definitely important, but Schneider’s research highlights major aspects of work that the simple view misses: things like stability, predictability, and autonomy. In other words, not just having a job, but having a good job.
So what is a good job? And what are the consequences of good (or bad) jobs on economies and people’s lives?
Beyond wages
The simplest metric of a good job is how much it pays. This definitely matters to workers, and it’s something that economists and policymakers pay a lot of attention to, but Schneider says this is just one piece. We may be too focused on wages at the expense of other dimensions that are harder to measure but just as important (if not moreso).
Schneider agrees that money matters, but a modest increase in wages isn’t going to provide the deep change needed to make a bad job good: “Going from making $20,000 a year to $120,000 a year would make a really big difference, but does going from $9 an hour to $12 an hour do that? What our data suggests is that it helps, but no: that is not a fundamental transformation of an impoverished existence. But going from a schedule where you never know when you're going to work or how many hours you're going to get, where you may be called in and sent home to one where you don't, even at the same wage level, actually could be a kind of transformed existence.”
The most notable “bad job” traits are instability and unpredictability: “the days of a 9 to 5 are long gone, and so are the days of a regular night shift; a regular shift of any kind is not common.” Workers face fluctuating hours, last-minute schedule changes, being called in or sent home on short notice, and uncertainty about how many hours they’ll get or what their paycheck will be. Schneider compared the way employers treat labor to the way they treat inventory: something to be optimized “just in time.”
This may be convenient for employers and provide them with flexibility, but it creates real struggles for workers. First, it directly shapes lived experience: stress, sleep, anxiety, and the constant juggling of family responsibilities. Second, for hourly workers, time is literally money. When hours are unpredictable, so are earnings.
A “Good Jobs Index”
There’s a host of qualities (in addition to wages, stability, and predictability) that make a job good: benefits (like health insurance and paid leave), respect at work, voice in decision-making, the distribution of power in the workplace, and so on. With all these factors at play, it might be nice to create a simple “good jobs index,” but there are a number of challenges in boiling things down to a single number or short description.
For one thing, many of these qualities are hard to measure. Wages and employment are relatively simple to quantify, but voice and respect aren’t. Surveys can ask people to rate these qualities, and even put them on a numerical scale, but Schneider pointed out that these numbers just don’t have the same weight as numbers in dollars and cents.
Furthermore, the different qualities have different meanings. People might have different preferences over them; one person may be willing to work longer hours for more pay, while another may be on a stricter schedule. And a change in one quality doesn’t necessarily perfectly balance a change in another: a job with higher wages and lower predictability might have the same index as one with lower wages and higher predictability, but they are still different in important ways. Reducing “good jobs” down to a single number misses important differences among people and jobs.
Even though it is difficult to create a single “good jobs index,” measuring the quality of jobs remains important. Part of the focus on wages and employment is due to the ease of measuring them, but difficult-to-measure metrics can be just as meaningful in people’s lives.
The cost of bad jobs
The costs of bad jobs are far-reaching:
Individual: The most straightforward cost is on the workers themselves. In addition to the material hardship from low wages and benefits, Schneider has documented effects ranging from poor sleep quality to psychological distress and unhappiness. And importantly, these effects aren’t just from life outside of work: they come from working conditions themselves. It’s fundamentally “unsettling to not know when you'll work, to not know how many hours you'll get, and so what you'll be paid.”
Family and community: The costs of bad jobs also extend to families and communities. There are externalities to bad jobs. Some of this is borne by children. Economic insecurity and stressed parents make it difficult for children to thrive. And this spills over to their social network as well. Unpredictable work schedules make it nearly impossible to find stable, high-quality childcare, so parents are often forced to rely on friends or family for childcare — or leave their children alone. Schneider also stressed the connection to the epidemic of loneliness and depletion of social capital: unpredictable schedules also cut into socialization and community time.
Economic and national: Many people with bad jobs rely on the social safety net to supplement their income. For example, the Government Accountability Office found that about 70% of federal aid beneficiaries (for things like food assistance, Medicaid, childcare subsidies, and tax credits) work full time, and many are working at large corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s. In effect, public programs are subsidizing employers that provide jobs too poor and too unstable to support a decent life on their own.
What to do about bad jobs
In light of these costs, what solutions can we find?
Companies: Since companies are making the jobs, they are a natural place to start. There are some companies that take the “high road”: offering good jobs even as entry-level positions. One surprising finding from Schneider’s research is that even companies in the same industry — with almost identical products or services — vary a lot in the quality of jobs they offer, and the ones offering good jobs are able to be successful and profitable. In fact, a recent experiment which offered more stability and control for workers found that this increased productivity and sales. However, Schneider is not optimistic about companies taking action on their own (at least in the short run). The culture of competitiveness and business “conventional wisdom” is just too strong: “the high road is great where you can find it, but it's probably not just going to magically come and lift all workers out of bad jobs.”
Workers: Some might expect workers to sort into better jobs. Economists look for “compensating differentials”: good aspects of jobs that trade off for worse aspects of jobs (for example getting higher wages for a less stable schedule). Schneider is skeptical. From his survey evidence, it seems more likely that negative aspects of bad jobs reflect a lack of options rather than a choice to make a tradeoff.
Policy: Schneider believes policy has a role to play in promoting goods jobs This can be done in direct ways like minimum wages or rules about scheduling, but a major finding in Schneider’s (and others’) research is that companies routinely ignore these sorts of laws. They aren’t useless, but a law which mandates something like a good job is not a guarantee. This is why people are especially interested in policies which can change power dynamics within companies. Laws which support worker voice and organization not only help with enforcement of existing labor laws but also allow workers to define their own vision of a good job.
All told, there are no silver bullets, but the most promising avenue is to give workers more power.
Out of the fishbowl
Schneider encourages us to think outside the “fishbowl” of prevailing economic ideology. Wages and employment may be easy to measure and include in careful causal inference, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only thing that matters. Power, norms, culture, history, and institutional design are more nuanced but no less important to understanding people’s working lives. These require different methods to understand, which can be challenging, but they offer new and important solutions to outstanding problems of working struggles and economic inequality.
