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<div class="timestamp">September 19, 2012</div>
<h1>When Flexibility Hurts</h1>
<h6 class="byline">By
<span><span>SUSAN J. LAMBERT</span></span></h6>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
Chicago </p>
<p>
AT first glance, women at the top and the bottom of the labor market seem to have very different problems. </p>
<p>
Professional women at law firms, in academia and in the media complain
about the punishing hours — and unceasing streams of e-mail — that make
it difficult to make time for their families. At the other extreme, many
women in retail, restaurant and health care jobs are underemployed;
they’re looking for more hours of work (and ideally, regular hours) to
support their families. </p>
<p>
But both problems share a root cause: the incentives that guide businesses’ employment practices. </p>
<p>
Rather than being long and relentless, work hours in hourly jobs,
especially low-level ones, are often scarce, fluctuating and
unpredictable. Sales associates and restaurant servers might be
scheduled for 7 hours one week and 32 the next. Hotel housekeepers might
work Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday one week, and then Sunday, Thursday
and Saturday the following week. Schedules are often posted just a few
days in advance. And women in hourly jobs are likely to have less input
than men in determining their work schedules, according to national
surveys. </p>
<p>
The lack of stability is especially hard on parents. Unpredictable work
schedules leave them scrambling to arrange child care and reluctant to
volunteer for school events or to schedule doctor’s appointments. They
make it tough to establish the household routines that experts tell us
are essential for healthy child development, like bedtime rituals,
homework monitoring and family meal times. Unstable hours also result in
unstable earnings, a nightmare for parents on tight budgets. </p>
<p>
Well-educated women have benefited from the growing gap between workers
who have college degrees and those who don’t. But low-paid women have
been left vulnerable by cuts to safety net programs. In 2011, nearly
half of the households headed by single mothers who worked part-time or
part-year were poor (46.8 percent), compared with 8.9 percent of
households headed by single mothers who worked full-time, year round.
</p>
<p>
The different pressures on salaried and hourly workers arise from companies’ trying to maximize productivity. </p>
<p>
Professional positions come with fixed costs (yearly salaries and
benefits like health insurance) that are incurred regardless of how many
hours the employee works. So employers have an incentive to have those
individuals work as much as possible. One person is often doing the work
of two. </p>
<p>
The inverse is true in hourly jobs, where employers have an incentive to
keep each individual’s work hours to a minimum. Employers want to avoid
paying for overtime and, of course, many don’t offer health insurance.
Their goal is to pay only for that amount of work that is necessary.
</p>
<p>
Employers tend to keep head counts high for low-level hourly jobs so
that they have a large pool of workers who can be scheduled for short
shifts at times of peak demand. Technologies like computerized
scheduling systems and forecasting tools make it possible to predict and
monitor sales and calibrate work schedules not just by the day but by
the hour. Employees are called in or sent home as needed. For each of
these jobs there are often three workers available. </p>
<p>
Although over- and underemployment create different challenges for
workers, the trade-offs are strikingly similar. “Availability” is now a
major form of human capital, in both high-powered salaried positions and
low-level hourly jobs. Low-wage workers need to be available at all
hours or risk not having work. Professionals are expected to remain
electronically tethered to their jobs day and night or risk forgoing
coveted opportunities. Both groups of workers lose earnings if they
interrupt their careers to care for family members — as women at all
points on the socioeconomic spectrum are more likely to do than their
male counterparts. </p>
<p>
Improving workplace norms may be essential to achieving gender equality,
as the Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter suggested in her<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/"> recent essay in The Atlantic</a>,
but it will not change the incentives that foster over-employment at
the top of the labor market and underemployment at the bottom. </p>
<p>
To do that, the government must reform the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Enacted in 1938 — decades before women’s labor force participation
became the norm — the law established a minimum hourly wage but did not
guarantee minimum weekly hours for any job (though unions may bargain
for minimum hours). This reform would encourage employers to make full
use of their hourly employees instead of overhiring, at low cost, a pool
of on-demand shift workers. </p>
<p>
The law also did not mandate that salaried workers get overtime pay.
Requiring overtime pay for professionals would encourage employers to
minimize unnecessary face time and to hire assistants to reduce the
demands on professionals. </p>
<p>
Such sweeping changes to labor laws might be politically impossible
today, in an environment that is friendly to corporations and
indifferent, if not hostile, to workers. But they are essential. They
would press employers to hire one worker for one job, easing work-life
challenges at both the top and the bottom of the labor market. That
would create more entry-level professional positions for college
graduates and better-paying jobs to lift low-income families into the
middle class. It’s what women want and what our economy needs. </p>
<div class="authorIdentification">
<p> <a href="http://ssascholars.uchicago.edu/s-lambert/">Susan J. Lambert</a> is an associate professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. </p> </div>
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