Fair Workweek laws led to clear benefits for workers

Hourly workers in the United States are often paid low wages, have few benefits, and face unstable schedules and insufficient work hours. Over the last decade, 10 cities and states have implemented “fair work week” or “predictable scheduling” laws to offer workers more stability and predictability in their work schedules.

Daniel Schneider, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, together with coauthors Kristen Harknett, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Arbelaez, a Harvard doctoral student in Sociology and Social Policy, recently published “Fair Workweek Laws in the U.S.: An Appraisal of Intended and Unintended Consequences.” They studied the impact of these ordinances in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Oregon, and Seattle. 

What are Fair Workweek laws?

Fair Workweek laws are designed to offer employees more stable and predictable schedules as well as greater access to sufficient work hours. The laws aim to do so by requiring employers to let employees know of their work schedules at least two weeks in advance. They also regulate back-to-back closing then opening shifts (“clopening” shifts) and require “predictability pay” for on-call work or last-minute changes to schedules. To help ensure workers have sufficient hours, the laws require employers to offer new shifts to their existing workers before hiring new part-time staff.

Some business groups have been opposed to Fair Workweek laws, though research has found that stable scheduling can improve workers’ productivity and reduce turnover. There is a risk, however, that employers might try to “compensate” for the requirements of Fair Workweek legislation by lowering wages or benefits or changing their hiring practices. 

Schneider and his coauthors looked into this, measuring the ways the ordinances might help or harm workers. 

Are Fair Workweek ordinances effective? 

The researchers looked at a number of potential impacts of Fair Workweek legislation in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Oregon, and Seattle by tracking conditions before and after legislation took effect and then comparing any changes to those in similar cities. They collected data over seven years, surveying more than 87,000 American hourly retail and food service workers. 

The researchers found that Fair Workweek regulations were effective in a number of ways. They increased the likelihood that workers would get advance notice of their schedules by 29%, decreased the amount of “clopening” shifts, and reduced last-minute changes to workers’ schedules. Importantly, the team did not find evidence that employers reallocated their workers or decreased wages or benefits in response to these laws.   

They did find that the effectiveness of these ordinances varied significantly across cities—New York City, for example, had a 25-percentage-point increase in the share of workers getting two or more weeks advance notice of their schedules, while Philadelphia had just a 5-percentage-point increase. (The researchers attributed this finding to particularly strong labor enforcement in New York City and the city’s high penalties for violations.) And in Chicago, workers had a slight uptick in timing changes or cancelled shifts and a slight loss of weekly hours. 

They did not find evidence that the Fair Workweek laws lessened shift cancellations or on-call shifts, and they did not increase access to work hours for involuntary part-time workers.  

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