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A Penn study found a link between unpredictable schedules and stress







A new study claims that an unpredictable schedule can hurt both one's health and one's productivity. Credit: Avalon Morell

A recently released Penn and University of California, Berkeley study found that unpredictable schedules can have negative impacts on the health of an individual working in the service sector.

The study, “Schedule instability and unpredictability and worker and family health and wellbeing” was conducted by co-researchers sociology professors Kristen Harknett and Daniel Schneider, from Penn and Berkeley, who researched the relationship between family instability and economic insecurity.

Focusing on how lack of notice and instability in work schedules affect an individual’s health, the researchers created a novel dataset for their “Retail Work and Family Life Study.” Using Facebook as an advertising platform to reach workers ranging from 18 to 50 years old, they collected information from 6,476 hourly non-managerial workers from eight of the largest retail companies in the United States.

“It’s a chronic and huge problem that people don’t have enough hours, and that seems to be driving other scheduling problems,” Harknett said.

The data demonstrated a clear connection between scheduling and physical, mental and financial well-being. According to the report, unstable and unpredictable schedules are “related to financial insecurity, worse health outcomes, and parenting stress and reduced time with children for working parents.”

Harknett stressed that two of the most important changes that can be made to empower workers include boosting hours and increasing scheduling notice.

“All major cities have a lot of service sector employees and Philly is no exception,” she said.

Some cities, such as Seattle and San Francisco, have already passed legislation, such as fair work week proposals, to further protect the rights of workers. New York City is expected to pass legislation later this year.

The researchers received grant support from the Hellman Fellows Fund, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

This project is far from finished. Since publishing their report, Harknett and Schneider have expanded their dataset to include information on workers from thirty large national employers and intend to study the effects of legislative changes in Seattle and the prospective changes in New York City.

“A lot of the things that San Francisco and Seattle and others have done are common sense; they’re humane. These workers are people – they have lives, children.”

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