Flexibility For Whom? Paid Leave and Scheduling Stability for Working Families

Imagine this: you are the primary caretaker for your grandparent, while also going to school full-time and working a full-time job. Now figure out what happens when, on top of all that, you or someone you love gets sick. Unfortunately, Naida doesn’t have to imagine—this is their reality. As Naida puts it: “When you clock out from work, you’re going home to clock in. It’s never done.”

Earlier this year, our partners at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), A Better Balance, and the National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy published a report on young workers’ need for paid family and medical leave and paid sick time to make their lives manageable. The report, Young Workers Speak Out: New Perspectives on The Need for Paid Leave, draws on interviews with workers aged 18-29, including Naida, from states across the country. It finds that without national policies providing paid time off from work, many workers are unable to care for themselves and their loved ones and are instead forced to choose between their personal or financial well-being.

Beyond the top-line findings on the need for paid leave, one additional theme emerged: the importance of being able to control your work schedule. Workers in the report describe how difficult work schedules make it hard to find child care, care for their loved ones, and manage school and other obligations outside of work.

Sadly, this didn’t come as a surprise. At NWLC, we have been talking for years about how unpredictable, unstable, and inflexible scheduling policies make it nearly impossible for workers to succeed on the job while thriving outside of work. Many people working in low-paid jobs lack the ability to control or provide input into the timing of the hours that they work, and they’re unable to make even minor adjustments to their work schedules without suffering a penalty. Some parents even say they’ve been passed over for a promotion or raise because they asked for some flexibility in their work schedule.

But just saying that workers want “flexibility” on the job doesn’t point us to the policy solutions that will actually provide workers with what they really need. We have to ask: flexibility for whom?

Too often, employers—and their lobbyists—say that workers like the “flexibility” that their last-minute or top-down scheduling policies provide. But we know the truth. According to survey research from the Shift Project, the vast majority of hourly service sector workers want a more stable and predictable schedule. These just-in-time scheduling practices may provide a lot of flexibility for employers, but they provide very little flexibility for employees. And research shows that workers in jobs with unstable and unpredictable schedules are actually far less likely to report having flexibility on the job than workers who have stable and predictable schedules.

It isn’t enough to talk about flexibility as a broad concept; we need to create policies that enable tangible, worker-driven flexibility. This is why NWLC is a champion of fair work schedules policies that give workers stability, predictability, and control over their work schedules.

Fair work scheduling policies benefit employees and employers alike. Consistent hours and advance notice of work schedules make it easier for employees to plan their lives outside of work, which in turn means they are more stable and reliable employees. When managers work with employees to increase consistency and worker-driven flexibility in shift scheduling, it increases satisfaction on the job and business sales.

This includes making sure that workers have predictability and input into their schedules at work, along with the ability to easily swap shifts with colleagues. In order to manage caregiving responsibilities, medical conditions, or anything else going on in their lives, workers need to know when they’ll be at work and when they can count on time off. As Jacob, another worker interviewed in the report, says: “If you create an environment where people can communicate openly, people will easily communicate and say, ‘I need to take time.’”

Workers know the solutions they need. It’s up to us to listen.