It’s been 5 years since coffee, food, and retail workers organizing with Working Washington won the strongest secure scheduling law in the country. And now, new research is out showing this law is working as intended.
Back in 2016, workers were pushing for a basic solution to the crisis of unstable and unpredictable hours: protections to ensure workers know when they’re going to work and how many hours they’re going to get.
Big companies moaned that they couldn't possibly plan staffing, because how could a restaurant predict what time of day or week people might want to eat? They claimed that in fact people actually liked working clopening shifts and getting no rest. Former Starbucks executive Howard Behar took out a full-page newspaper ad and The Seattle Times ran an editorial, each bemoaning the impact stable schedules would have on the city's "business climate".
But despite all the threats, Seattle workers won landmark secure scheduling protections.
So, five years later, how’d it all turn out?
New research confirms what Seattle workers already knew: the right to a stable, predictable schedule has been transformative. Academic researchers with The Shift Project at Harvard, UC San Francisco, and UC Berkeley analyzed 17,689 survey responses collected from retail workers in Seattle and around the country.
They found that secure scheduling laws have made a big difference in workers’ lives. In cities without secure scheduling laws, workers' schedules got worse. In Seattle, workers' schedules got a lot better:
Seattle workers are seeing better and more predictable schedules, which means fewer on-call shifts, clopening shifts, and last-minute schedule changes.
That’s because the law is working: covered employers are providing workers with advance notice of their schedules, and they're paying workers the required extra compensation when a schedule gets changed at the last minute.
And with their improved schedules, workers are reporting better sleep, improved mental health, and more financial stability.
You can click here to read a summary of the study, or here to read the whole thing.
Everyone needs a stable and predictable schedule that allows them to live a more balanced life. We know that secure scheduling laws work — so let’s build the power we need to win them across our state and around the country.