The death of a Dunkin’ Donuts employee highlights a crisis of how part-time workers lie about their lives and never say no to employers

All Maria Fernandes wanted was a nap.

Juggling three jobs, her only opportunity to do so was to sleep in her car after she drove from one job to another. All three of her jobs were with Dunkin’ Donuts. Each was at a different location. She spent so much time in her car that she found it easier to just sleep there between shifts.



On 25 August, after working her regular overnight shift in Linden, New Jersey, Fernandes drove to a parking lot where, after briefly speaking with her boyfriend, she curled up for a quick nap. She never woke up. Poisoned by the carbon monoxide and fumes from an overturned gascan, she was found dead eight hours later.

“This sounds like someone who tried desperately to work and make ends meet, and met with a tragic accident,” Elizabeth, New Jersey police Lt Daniel Saulnier said at the time.

Fernandes’ death highlights the difficulties of part-time workers: their struggle for hours, which can get so intense that they must lie about their other jobs or pretend they don’t have children; how uninformed they are about the laws that govern their schedules; how their schedules can be used by managers to punish them.

These problems affect millions of people. In August, there were over 7.2 million part-time workers who wanted a full-time job, but couldn’t find one. That same month about 3.4 million workers held two jobs in order to make ends meet; for one-third of those workers, both of those jobs were part time.



The part-time worker is becoming a new normal – and it is an adult problem. Much of the fast-food industry, in particular, has been built on the outdated perception that minimum-wage jobs are only for high-school or college students. In 2013, 4.7 million of involuntary part-time US workers were over 25-years-old; a million of them were over 55-years-old.



“The long-term picture is this is much more part of the American economy than it was a generation ago,” says Arun Ivatury, campaign strategist at the National Employment Law Project.



“The image that these fast-food empires create of ‘Well, most of our people are just high school students and they are just trying to make a couple of extra dollars after they get out of school every day’ is a total bullshit,” says James Reif, partner at Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss, LLP. His firm is suing McDonald’s in a wage-theft case.

“Most part-time workers don’t want to work part-time. They want to work full-time,” says Reif. “If you look at McDonald’s workforce, the vast majority of people are not only not of high school age, they could be in their 30s or 40s or whatever. They could’ve been working there for years and they are always looking to work more time.”

While the increase in part-time work was mainly due to recession, employers have now come to realize the benefits of employing mostly part-time workers instead of full-time ones. By relying on part-time workforce, employers can avoid paying overtime and benefits like health care.

The power is in the hands of employers, says Ivatury.



“What little regulations there are for hourly workers – with part-time workers you can avoid even those,” explains Ivatury.

He attributes the scheduling crisis in part-time work to “the efforts of employers to keep as much flexibility for themselves as possible to avoid as many obligations as they can towards their workforce”.



“As a result, you are seeing more cases like that of Maria Fernandes where people end up struggling, and end up in a situation that might be dangerous to themselves and be difficult for their families, because they are just trying to make ends meet,” says Ivatury.



In Fernandes’s case, her managers described her as a model employee over her four years with the company in Linden, New Jersey. Yet, they wouldn’t give her enough hours to round out a full-time job: each manager, intent on keeping her as only a part-time employee, wouldn’t provide her with more hours when she asked them. About year and a half ago, she obtained two other jobs, both at Dunkin’ Donuts locations, to cobble together the equivalent of one full-time job.



Fernandes is not rare.



Part-time workers often have to find ways to get around the rules. In other cases, fear has many part-time workers dissembling about their lives, forced to pretend they don’t have children or other responsibilities so that they look more employable.



Most places who depend on part-time workers won’t even hire an employee if they know he or she has another job.



“Even just to get hired, you have to have open availability,” explains Sasha Hammad, director of the Retail Action Project, an initiative of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

I have spoken to many parents who have said that in job interviews, they actually don’t reveal that they have children, because they are afraid that employers will think: ‘Oh, they are going to want to pick up their child from child care’ or ‘Oh, they’ll need to be home at night to make them dinner or help them with their homework. We don’t want that kind of restriction. We want maximum flexibility.’

As a result, workers hide the fact they have children and try not mention them at work.



These low-wage workers also have to juggle their obligations to their family with this job that barely enables them to make ends meet.

Another source of fear: retribution for being anything less than perfectly available.



Few protections are extended to part-time workers, so schedules can be used as a weapon to carry out punishment.



If a worker is asked to work an extra shift or stay few extra hours and refuses, it’s likely that his or her hours will be cut. “That’s a common practice across the board. Workers are really afraid to say no to employers’ last minute requests because they know that,” says Hammad.



“There is a lot of fear in stores. Scheduling is often used as a tool of punishment,” she adds.

The result is predictable: most workers refuse to say “no” to even the worst hours. They also can’t afford to reject hours, because working more hours means more money.

Many stores also use technology that dehumanizes the process. Ng Ju San, a former McDonald’s worker told the Guardian earlier this year:

The manager would always look at point of sales, POS, system, a restaurant software, to make sure that no one got too many hours so as to not pay them too much. Sometimes we would have a lot of customers, but the POS would flag the manager, ‘Hey, you are paying too much in salary.’ He would say: ‘Oh, you must go home’ even though everyone was already working at their max because of the orders that were coming in. He would still send you home, because the algorithms would tell him that he has too high of an overhead and he must cut that down until he can improve profit. So you end up with even more orders but fewer people to work on them.



The future of scheduling will be in Congress and in the courts. Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced legislation on the issue, and the lawsuit that Reif’s firm has leveled against McDonald’s is currently pending in a New York court.



Reif says the problem comes down to accountability, which is hard to find in the franchise system that rules most fast-food places who depend on minimum-wage workers.



“The franchisors – the big boss, the McDonald’s, the Dunkin’ Donuts, the Burger Kings, the Starbucks, the whatever of the world – engage these middle men, who are the franchisees to cook and sell their product and whenever a worker in one of these places sues the franchisee, they can have the same line as the garment manufacturers have: ‘Oh, I am terribly shocked to learn that you are being mistreated at your work, but I have no responsibility for it, because I am not your employer.’”