Less-educated workers tend to receive hourly wages, which means that their employers have to pay them more for every extra hour worked. Instead of encouraging these employees to work longer hours, employers have tended to hire more part-time workers. Or they hire workers for a limited time, sometimes through subcontractors. Often part-time or limited-time workers are not eligible for fringe benefits such as health insurance, which provides further savings to employers. In this way, the labor market seems to be moving in opposite directions at the top and bottom, toward longer hours among the college educated and shorter hours among the less well-educated (Kalleberg, 2011). Yet the problems for workers in the lower levels of the labor market include not only getting enough hours of work but also controlling the times that they get. Many wage workers don’t know what hours their employers will want them to work until soon before they are supposed to start. One national study showed that 41 percent of early-career workers who get paid by the hour did not know when they were expected to work until a week or less before the actual date. For workers who were mothers and fathers the percentages were even higher (Lambert, Fugiel, & Henly, 2014). This unpredictability is so common that two scholars call it, with some irony, normal unpredictability, by which they mean the pervasiveness—the widespread nature—of unpredictability in job hours and schedules which makes it difficult for workers to control time (Gerstel & Clawson, 2018). It is a major challenge for working parents in lower–white-collar, blue-collar, and service occupations. A change with little warning in one parent’s schedule may cause the other one to scramble to change her or his schedule to accommodate children’s needs; and it may cause a grandmother who provides child care to change her schedule. Add in the unpredictability of families’ daily routines—a child is too sick to attend school, a day care provider is on vacation—and the unpredictability of both work and family life can create intense stress.
Less-educated workers tend to receive hourly wages, which means that their employers have to pay them more for every extra hour worked. Instead of encouraging these employees to work longer hours, employers have tended to hire more part-time workers. Or they hire workers for a limited time, sometimes through subcontractors. Often part-time or limited-time workers are not eligible for fringe benefits such as health insurance, which provides further savings to employers. In this way, the labor market seems to be moving in opposite directions at the top and bottom, toward longer hours among the college educated and shorter hours among the less well-educated (Kalleberg, 2011). Yet the problems for workers in the lower levels of the labor market include not only getting enough hours of work but also controlling the times that they get. Many wage workers don’t know what hours their employers will want them to work until soon before they are supposed to start. One national study showed that 41 percent of early-career workers who get paid by the hour did not know when they were expected to work until a week or less before the actual date. For workers who were mothers and fathers the percentages were even higher (Lambert, Fugiel, & Henly, 2014). This unpredictability is so common that two scholars call it, with some irony, normal unpredictability, by which they mean the pervasiveness—the widespread nature—of unpredictability in job hours and schedules which makes it difficult for workers to control time (Gerstel & Clawson, 2018). It is a major challenge for working parents in lower–white-collar, blue-collar, and service occupations. A change with little warning in one parent’s schedule may cause the other one to scramble to change her or his schedule to accommodate children’s needs; and it may cause a grandmother who provides child care to change her schedule. Add in the unpredictability of families’ daily routines—a child is too sick to attend school, a day care provider is on vacation—and the unpredictability of both work and family life can create intense stress.
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