Civic Skunk Works, 4/1/2016
Recently, Working Washington interviewed over 300 service industry Seattle workers about their schedules. If you don’t work in the service industry, or if you haven’t worked in the service industry for over a decade, you might find the results to be shocking.
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Of the 300 people Working Washington talked to, the average part-time work week was 25 hours, with a weekly variability of 14.9 hours—so you might work ten hours one week and 40 hours the next. In fact, three-quarters of all those employees polled saw their weekly schedules regularly grow or shrink by 8 hours or more. How do you plan around a schedule like that, with a full days work (and pay) disappearing and reappearing at random? How do you budget rent, food, transportation and all the other necessities, knowing that you very well might get three ten-hour weeks in a row?