Mr. Justin Time Sets a Cruel Work Schedule

Just-in-time scheduling lets an algorithm decide when — and whether — millions of people work. Surveys find 40% of shift workers (mostly in retail and food service) don’t know their schedule a week in advance. They can also get sent home mid-shift or asked to be on call, unpaid. Studies show that more than 50% of hourly workers’ income swings up to 30% month-to-month, making it hard to budget for rent, qualify for benefits, or plan. A landmark study done at The Gap a decade ago proved stable schedules boost not only morale, but sales, so this isn't even bad for business. We already have fair workweek laws in many big cities, but this is a no-brainer for an update to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Chapters: 1:01 Announcements — Review shoutouts, Benevity donor thanks. 2:15 Retcon — July 4th recap, AI job-loss predictions walked back. 7:29 Terms & Conditions — Just In Time scheduling and clopening. 10:21 The Big Pilcrow: Underwork — Why part-time and shift workers get scheduled unfairly. 13:50 How the BLS tracks part-time hours by industry. 17:05 Economic vs. non-economic part-time reasons. 25:05 The Gap Study — Predictive scheduling boosted sales 7%. 28:22 Consequences — Income volatility and benefits fraud traps. 32:06 Fair workweek law and bills 35:20 Labor market regulation as low-cost policy. 41:59 Executive Orders — Credit card charge names, smaller jar lids. 43:52 Spiritual Sponsors — WaPo editorial takedown, new yoga studio. 48:12 Credits Donate to Optimist Economy: https://optimisteconomy.com Video-curious? We have clips on the Optimist Economy YouTube channel⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@optimist_economy. Follow us on social media, now including Facebook! We’re also on Instagram at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy https://www.instagram.com/optimist_economy or TikTok at ⁠⁠@optimist_economy https://www.tiktok.com/@optimist_economy. Chat with other Optimists on Substack. https://substack.com/chat/4604257?utm_source=pub-nav-bar Optimist Merch: https://merch.ambientinks.com/collections/optimisteconomy Got economic questions, concerns, or executive orders? Send them to [email protected] mailto:[email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:30Robin Rauzi?

  I feel like they hear the other Catherine, the one who goes on Marketplace, and they're like, oh, let's get the-

• 0:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's true. Serious economist Catherine.

• 0:37Robin Rauzi?

  Serious Catherine, yeah.

• 0:38Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm here to talk about the labor market. It's a show. You're welcome. Yeah, great.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 0:51Robin Rauzi?

  Hello. Welcome back.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  And welcome back to Optimist Economy. I'm economist Catherine Ann Edwards.

• 0:57Robin Rauzi?

  I'm editor Robin Rousey.

• 0:58Speaker 03

  On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.

• 1:09Robin Rauzi?

  This week on Optimist Economy, we're talking about sort of the flip side of unpaid overtime, which is underemployment.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Underwork. Not getting enough hours.

• 1:17Robin Rauzi?

  Underwork?

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18Robin Rauzi?

  Bad scheduling.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Bad scheduling stuff.

• 1:21Robin Rauzi?

  The title of this episode unofficially is [BLEEP] Schedules. But I did change it to Underwork.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  We're gonna land on something by the end. Few announcements. Mine would be that we did a replay of one of our episodes from last season, and it included our favorite review of all time from Johnny Five that includes the shout-out to the tireless work that Sophie has to put in to make us sound like a real show. And that reminded me, y'all leave us a review.

• 1:51Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  It can be instructive and give us maybe some tips, like, be sure to hit record, ladies, you're doing it. We love hearing from you, and we also love growing with your comments, even if it's just laughing at how ridiculous they are.

• 2:06Robin Rauzi?

  That was the review that said something like, stay for the tire fire.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Yes, it was like this show is an assault on the medium.

• 2:13Robin Rauzi?

  That's right, that's right. Yeah.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Or Johnny Five, if you're out there, let us know what you think. Like, have we gotten better?

• 2:21Robin Rauzi?

  Or don't, I don't know. Okay. My announcement is I want to thank Hannah W. from Roselle, Illinois. She made a generous contribution to Optimist Economy through Benevity. So Benevity is a platform that many big companies use, and they let their employees donate to nonprofits. And if you need information about Optimist Economy as a nonprofit, it's all on our website. Just click Donate.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Awesome. Okay.

• 2:45Robin Rauzi?

  Redcon.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Redcon. Checking in.

• 2:49Robin Rauzi?

  Checking in.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  America, in fact, turned 250 years old.

• 2:54Robin Rauzi?

  We did not prevent that from happening.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  There were some real close calls on the East Coast because of a heat dome and some pretty crazy storms, but everything went through. So how did you celebrate?

• 3:05Robin Rauzi?

  I was in Louisville, Kentucky. As I think I told folks, there was a good bit of bourbon involved. I discovered a really terrific cocktail, which is called Stings Like a Bee, because Muhammad Ali is from Louisville. And Stings Like a Bee is made with bourbon, hot honey, lemon, and ginger puree shaken over ice. And it is fantastic. Yeah, so that was my celebration of America turning 250.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  I love it. So were you feeling like optimistic? Like, did the episode settle with you? Do you feel like our conversation like maybe turned you around a little bit? How'd we do?

• 3:43Robin Rauzi?

  I don't know. I feel like 50% there. We did watch fireworks, but we didn't go outside. I don't know. I guess all I wanted to say in kind of about America 250 is I'm sorry if I bummed everybody out before the holiday. I mean, I know that some people wrote in comments that they felt a little more like I did, and they were just kind of getting through that holiday.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  But all voices are welcome on the show, including bummer times.

• 4:06Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Like Robin, and they'll run up to July 4th. But you know what? We had our nation's cocktail of stings like a bee to help you out.

• 4:17Robin Rauzi?

  Don't go me through. Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:18Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Um, we had a party and we got like a little in our heads about having people over to our house on July 4th in Houston without some kind of water feature because it is so ungodly hot.

• 4:31Robin Rauzi?

  Because you don't have a pool.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  We don't have a pool. So we ended up getting, I don't think this is like the branded name. So I don't feel like we're missing out on sponsor money. But yeah, we got Mount Splashmore. It's about eight feet tall. It's almost like a bouncy castle slide that we built that has its own pool. So we basically spent money to get Mount Splashmore. And I think actually the most brilliant thing we did was that we have a soccer tent that we use for parties, like an XL soccer tent. And so we were able to set that up over Mount Splashmore. So they were in the shade the whole time. And every parent who walked in looked at the slide, looked at the shade and was like, awesome.

• 5:11Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, I want to tell you, I did try to watch Independence Day on the flight home, but it was not available. So I watched Ben at Light Beckham.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, but you hadn't seen it before.

• 5:20Robin Rauzi?

  No, I'd seen it, but I hadn't seen it since it came out 20 years ago.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Oh, and what did you think on the rewatch?

• 5:24Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, it holds up. It holds up.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  It really does. I don't want to tell you how much of that movie I could quote from memory, but if there was ever some kind of like high stakes situation where the entire movie needed to be recited, I'd be like, I'm giving it a try. I, I had one, I guess, real retcon.

• 5:40Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Which is, we've talked several times on the show about job loss that could come from artificial intelligence. And you should know that I, especially in the first season episode on AI, treated it with mocking disdain and how these CEOs of AI companies talked about the effect of AI on our labor market and the things that we would need to do, like 80% of people wouldn't have a job and we'd have to have UBI because there was nothing else left. Wall Street Journal reported just this week that most tech CEOs are rapidly walking back pretty much every job prediction they had.

• 6:16Robin Rauzi?

  Though it seemed to say that they were walking it back because turns out that people are pretty hostile to hearing that that's what AI is going to do, not because they've actually genuinely changed their tune.

• 6:25Speaker 03

  We don't know why they said it in the first place, so we don't know why they stopped saying it, but there's certainly like one hypothesis that the article put forward was people hate AI and they hate AI data centers and they hate these companies and they hate that it could hurt the labor market. And so they're like, maybe we should stop bragging about it to people.

• 6:43Robin Rauzi?

  Saying that, yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  And then the other part was that the data story is like, they basically said before their product even had users, years before it was released, they said it was going to wipe out all jobs. And then now as companies are actually using them, they were like, so this is crazy, but like it made them more productive and they hired more. They no longer predict the end of the economy as we know it from their products. And I was like, well, you know what? So long as you got there, you made it to the party.

• 7:15Robin Rauzi?

  I mean, you did always wonder why they wanted to, you know, put on the outfit and dance around like a supervillain. Like it never made much sense. But also people have been predicting that we're going to automate 20 to 80% of jobs. I don't know, since at least 2010 and probably before that, like long before large language models were a thing. Like automation has been discussed for ages and ages. And I don't know why these guys thought their automation would be different.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  I have like so many thoughts and feelings on this, but I thought I would just kind of update our listeners that the impending economic doom that comes from a chatbot that makes it easier to book your vacation has been walked back some by their, by the people who sell it. So that's good.

• 7:57Robin Rauzi?

  Okay. Terms and conditions? Did you have one?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  I have one. It's called just in time. So just in time started as a manufacturing production model in Japan, pioneered at Toyota. Japan coming out of World War II, they didn't have a lot of money. They didn't have a lot of resources. Their economy was in, country was flattened in so many ways. In order to kind of build out and expand their production and manufacturing base, they had to cut out as much waste as possible. So the idea of just in time was developed by a Toyota guy. I don't know his actual job.

• 8:35Robin Rauzi?

  A guy.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  But some guy at Toyota, who's probably like really important. He basically came up with like, we should only order parts as we need them. We shouldn't put in a bulk order for things, assuming that it'll be purchased. We should try to make the production process as lean as possible. This led to this idea of lean manufacturing. But it also led to the use of just in time as a way to describe a philosophical approach to your use of resources as an employer or company that reduces waste at all cost. Like, the North Star of just in time is trim the fat, no waste. Just in time, one of its more kind of pervasive uses today is on scheduling.

• 9:14Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  And the idea of like, when do you need a staff member at a store 100 years ago versus today would be, well, I need staff for when it's open and enough to do the work. Now, it is a like, kind of complex computer program that uses everything from like, the weather, to the number of people who came in the store in the last year, to come up with a just in time scheduling model to try and right-size the exact number of people you have working at a store at a given time.

• 9:41Robin Rauzi?

  Exactly. Which could be used for good or used for evil.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Guess which one they use it for.

• 9:50Robin Rauzi?

  My term and condition was a word that pretty much defines itself. It's clopening, which is when you are asked to work a shift where you both close the night before and then open the next morning. And this is particularly onerous if you work in food service, where you might be at a fast food restaurant until, say, 10 o'clock at night, and then open a store at 6 o'clock in the morning, and you're there at 5. Anyway, so, clopening.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Clopening is a function of just in time, because the computer doesn't think that workers need to have eight hours of sleep

• 10:26Robin Rauzi?

  Rest.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  in between their shift. Okay, Sophie is thinking of him as the bad guy, Mr. Just in Time.

• 10:35Robin Rauzi?

  Mr. Just in Time.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  I'm okay with anthropomorphizing just in time as a person, Mr. Just in Time. Okay, so we'll be back with a centerpiece of scheduling.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Hey, we're back. Sorry. I tried to say it while Robin was still drinking.

• 10:55Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see what you did there.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  All right, we're here talking about hours. And we're also talking about how those hours are scheduled for people who don't get enough hours.

• 11:05Robin Rauzi?

  I've wanted to do this for a while because this, to me, is like an enormous problem with what seems to me to be a reasonably easy fix that journalists have been writing about for more than a decade that still persists, which is that while upper-middle-class people are busy running around saying, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could all work 32-hour work weeks? Or everybody should have the right to work part-time?" The people who actually work part-time get screwed, most of them. First of all, if you just work part-time, you get, by and large, you get paid less for this exact same job. And that doesn't even include the fact that you may not be eligible for benefits because you work part-time. That's just hourly wages are lower. But also, this is something that I think I was late to understanding myself,

• 11:49Robin Rauzi?

  which is that the variability in people's income from week to week is not... First of all, it's much more variable than we realize, and that it's not because they lose jobs or they have sporadic jobs. It's often because they get scheduled in totally random ways, where they may work 30 hours one week and 8 hours the next. And it also is kind of hard to track. Like, there's no really easy way to get a line of sight into what companies are doing and the effects that it's having. And so researchers, it seems to me, are like trying to pull together all these threads. And occasionally, the BLS is like, "No, it's not really a problem.

• 12:31Robin Rauzi?

  We're not really seeing more of this, or these numbers are pretty steady." And yet, we know that people are really suffering from income volatility and low-wage work that is made even worse, and their lives are made unsustainable by the unpredictability of their schedules.

• 12:48Robin Rauzi?

  Anyway, that was just my little rant about that issue. About why I wanted, like, this is a problem that I was just sort of surprised we hadn't gotten to yet.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we've done an episode before in the first season on how the right to work part-time would probably create a lot of employment in the US because there are people for whom meeting the full-time schedule is not possible. It's like there's this flip side to labor market regulation where some people work too much. They don't get overtime, they're not regulated, and they need to be able to work less. And then you have the people who don't work enough. They also need to be regulated into a more reasonable schedule because, check it out, most people, like, they just want to work in a predictable way where they can live and have a normal life. And you can't do that if you're totally married to your job in person five days a week where you end up working 60 hours a week and don't get overtime. And you also can't do that if you don't get enough in scheduling.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  So scheduling laws, it's like a two-way street for both the high-income, high-wage, high-hour workers and then the low-income, low-wage, low-hour workers, that they both need scheduling protection. It just needs to look really different.

• 13:50Robin Rauzi?

  Right. I mean, you've talked about the idea that people should have the right to request to work part-time. And there was an op-ed on this, I think, in the spring in the New York Times by the folks at the People's Policy Project that says, you know, basically, part-time workers should have the right to request to work full-time.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 14:11Robin Rauzi?

  And particularly before you go and hire more part-time workers.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, so, so here's kind of like how, here's how it shakes out. First off, part-time workers are paid less, they have the variability in scheduling that relates to volatility in income, but it's really hard to track kind of the size. So we can, we can start with measurement.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  The BLS surveys employers about jobs and households about work, which sound the same, but really they aren't. It's two separate things.

• 14:43Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  So employers talk about jobs and hours, and then workers talk about their hours. On the employer's side, we get data on average weekly hours of jobs in various industries across every industry, across all jobs in the US. It actually sits just under 35 hours per week. In part because the average includes all part-time workers or all part-time jobs.

• 15:09Robin Rauzi?

  Okay.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Because this is arranged by industry, we can see like where part-time jobs are. And they're not like randomly scattered throughout the economy. They're concentrated in certain industries. So retail trade, for example, the average hours across all jobs is 30 hours per week. And leisure and hospitality, it's 25 hours per week, which is a lot of restaurants.

• 15:31Robin Rauzi?

  That's what I was gonna ask, are restaurants and leisure hospitality?

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Leisure hospitality is hotels, any like performance venue, sporting venue, movie theaters, and then anywhere you go to eat food on-site. Also, I think it has my favorite establishment type in the entire US, which is drinking places. They're not called bars. In the industrial code, it's referred to as restaurants and drinking places. And those drinking places can be drinking places with adult beverages, but there's no bars. It's just drinking places.

• 16:03Robin Rauzi?

  So Starbucks is like a drinking place without adult beverages? And then there are drinking places with adult beverages that are bars?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Yes. Starbucks might count as a restaurant.

• 16:13Robin Rauzi?

  Because they have some food?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's a great question. I can do that next time for recon of like whether or not Starbucks is a restaurant or a drinking place. Leisure and hospitality, it is hotels and entertainment venues, but it's every restaurant. That's 25 hours a week.

• 16:28Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. And that's, I'm sorry, average.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Average.

• 16:32Robin Rauzi?

  Not median.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  So that would mean that there are entire industries in the US where your typical employee would be working part-time?

• 16:39Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. And if that's the average, there's lots of people working far less than that.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Yes, there's lots of people working far less than that. So that's kind of like premise one. We know that there are some industries that rely on part-time workers. So the kind of corollary to that is there are lots of ways in which when people think of the US economy, they make like groups that the BLS doesn't. Like, there is no tech sector. We don't have an industry called tech. We have information, we have financial activities, we have professional and business services, and some of those end up being colloquially referred to as the tech sector. But we don't have a tech sector. There's no official definition. For the same kind of purpose, we know that there are lots of shift workers in retail trade and leisure and hospitality, but we don't have an occupational category of shift work, and we don't have an industry of the shift sector.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  But when we think of the shift sector, we're often thinking about retail trade, leisure and hospitality, and then it picks up on professional and business services, janitorial staff. The reason why people get really, really dissatisfied with the BLS here is that in the household survey, you're asking people, how much do you work?

• 17:44Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  And what the BLS does is that it tends to label people as part-time if their total hours across all jobs are part-time.

• 17:52Robin Rauzi?

  Hmm. So they might have multiple part-time jobs but be working 50 hours a week.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so official from BLS, you are a part-time worker if you work up to 34 hours. And then the number of part-time workers ends up being smaller through this count. You end up with around 22 million right now.

• 18:13Robin Rauzi?

  It winds up being smaller than it probably is in actual, I don't know how to say this because of course their number is their number, but more people feel like they work part-time jobs than are reflected in that number. Is that what you're saying?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you're going to have roughly eight to nine million people who work multiple jobs in the US, and most multiple job holders are holding two part-time jobs. So part of it is you have the multiple job holding. And then the other part is that one to 34 is a pretty opaque category of how many hours people are working.

• 18:41Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  So that's dissatisfaction, part one.

• 18:45Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  The other dissatisfaction is that the BLS identifies part-time for economic or non-economic reasons.

• 18:53Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so part-time for economic reasons are people who report, I didn't work more than 35 hours last week, and the reason why was for some economic reason, meaning I couldn't find full-time work, or like business slack.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  The part-time for non-economic reasons unfortunately includes a lot of things that I think people would see as a similar kind of like

• 19:19Robin Rauzi?

  As an economic reason?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:21Robin Rauzi?

  Like I got hired and then they only scheduled me for this many hours?

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Yes, or you have some type of constraint, like full-time at the job is less than 35 hours.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  Meaning that they don't have people who work 40 hours a week. This is just what full-time is for the job that I have. That's one of the fastest rising categories of part-time employment. Because basically, there is no full-time equivalent at my job.

• 19:47Robin Rauzi?

  There is no full-time equivalent.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  It's a short week is what they call a short week job. Then, then people will say that they have family obligations, childcare constraints, they are in school or they're training and so they can't work full-time. So these non-economic reasons, they end up being like, kind of conflated to be people who wanted to be part-time, even though there are lots of people in that category who probably would want more hours. And so that's what ends up being the big kind of dissatisfaction with the BLS's measurement. It's measuring accurately, but it's missing the problem.

• 20:20Robin Rauzi?

  Right. Could that be fixed?

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Uh...

• 20:23Robin Rauzi?

  Or are we just kind of locked into measuring this this way?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  No, it could be fixed and they've done surveys where they supplement the regular. So there's a survey that they ask every month. It's called the basic monthly. And then they'll have supplements that they add to the basic monthly on a rotating basis. And one of them, they do the contingent worker survey, or the work scheduling survey, where they do find out a lot more information about this. Changing the core survey does not happen that often. They could change the core to reflect this. They just don't change it that often. I mean, they don't have a ton of money. It's not like they, I mean, it takes money to change the survey, but it's also they're very, very adherent to consistency. So you end up with these private researchers that are coming together with other ways of getting at

• 21:06Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  the variability. And yeah, these guys do a great job.

• 21:11Robin Rauzi?

  Are you talking about the people at the Shift Project?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  So, one of them is the Shift Project, which they-

• 21:15Robin Rauzi?

  Just really interesting stuff.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so some of the ways that we've gotten at this idea of involuntary, kind of erratic scheduling, comes from use of other surveys, and you can use those to find out about scheduling and irregular shifts and notification, but then the kind of the flagship right now is the Shift Project out of Harvard, which asks shift workers about their schedule and work arrangements.

• 21:39Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean, they do some really, really interesting surveys. The one that I was reading last night was about instability in scheduling. How far in advance do you even know what your schedule is?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Yes, and like, you know, shift workers, 40% of them will say, "I don't know it a week in advance." And it's scheduling that treats workers' shifts as cog in a machine.

• 21:59Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean-

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Like, I just need to-

• 22:00Robin Rauzi?

  But it's also a system that, I don't mean to interrupt, but I'm gonna.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  You talk a lot, so I feel very comfortable doing this.

• 22:14Robin Rauzi?

  But it's also, when you've got a company where the cost of labor is a huge input to your company, the ability to squeeze 5% out, to squeeze 10% out of your largest cost center, is something that companies want to do. Walmart, for instance, went from being an 80% full-time company, so they had like 20% part-time workers, and they now have more than 40% part-time workers, and that was a deliberate choice. It was a choice to build in the cost flexibility and the time flexibility that served Walmart and treated its workers like, as you said, cogs.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, like inhuman cogs. Like, you are not a person, you don't have a life, I don't respect you, you are just a shift to be scheduled. I mean, the implications of that aren't just on the scheduling side, but also on things like, your shift can be canceled when you show up.

• 23:05Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, or you get sent home early.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  You get sent home early, you're asked to stay late, so you don't know when you're going to work, you don't know if your shift will be your shift when you show up, and you don't know if it'll just not happen at all, end early, or go late.

• 23:22Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, my favorite is the on-call shift where you're not working at all or getting paid, but you're supposed to sit around and wait and make yourself available in case they might need you.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  And if you are on-call and they call you and you aren't available, you're either fired or you move to the bottom of the RODA. So this was something that came up. We kind of talked about this in a paid sick leave episode. But one of the consequences of being in a shift scheduling like system like this is that you have a basically a RODA. And it could be in like olden days, it was like the guy who ran the bar had his people that he called. But when a computer algorithm sets it, you are like marked as unreliable and you're moved to the bottom of the pile. So you either get fewer shifts, no shifts, or the worst shifts.

• 24:08Robin Rauzi?

  Shorter shifts, yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so you end up with like, I was working 35 hours a week, but I missed an on-call and now I haven't worked more than 10 over the past month. That is one of the reasons why paid sick leave laws ended up having such a boost to workers' income if they didn't have a college degree and were women with the kids at home because they were less likely to miss shifts because of having a sick kid. Or you weren't allowed to like be retributive towards them if they missed a shift. And then they were like able to maintain stable employment.

• 24:41Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, there's, I mean, there's absolutely with part-time work, the ability to punish people by just reducing their hours. And it's probably illegal, but it absolutely happens.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if you wanted to hold up as proof that you can use an algorithm, I'm sure these just-in-time models are all relying on AI now, but you can use an algorithm to set your labor and it's going to do so in an incredibly cruel way. Now, the real question is, but are they saving money? Like, do they save on cost? If this is their biggest cost and this is a way to save it, is this just what the future of work looks like? Of course it doesn't. If you treat people like garbage. They don't work as well and you can actually run an experiment to prove it, which is what a group of researchers did where they convinced, they didn't name it at first,

• 25:35Speaker 03

  but the Gap partnered with a research team to run a nine-month experiment where half of the stores were given predictive schedules and the other half of the scores were given, like they're basically just-in-time randomly set unpredicted schedules. The name of the report is, it's like, these people do not understand a narrative, "Stable Scheduling Increases Productivity in Sales." Like, tell me an economist wrote this report without telling me.

• 25:59Robin Rauzi?

  Without telling me.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  And it's called "The Stable Scheduling Study." So basically, what happened is that they partnered with the Gap to do a experiment on whether or not predictive scheduling is better for their bottom line than this just-in-time scheduling. And they did a pre-test to see like how it would work. And the pre-test Gap was like, "Maybe there's something to what you're saying." And they ended up changing some of their scheduling practices before the experiment even began. And so they didn't do a full experiment on every one of these horrible scheduling practices because two of them gapped it away with before the study even started.

• 26:35Robin Rauzi?

  Wow.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  And then they did the study. And one of the things that they did was called "Tech-Enabled Shift Swapping." They have something called "Shift Messenger." And they basically, if someone couldn't make a shift, rather than report it up to like the algo, they messaged each other, said, "Does anybody want this shift?" And they enabled workers to swap shifts, like easily.

• 26:56Robin Rauzi?

  I just read they did a study of that at IKEA, the shift work people did. And they, they basically were using one of the just-in-time systems, right? In this case, I think Kronos is the company who, who built it so that people could do exactly what you're talking about, but do it themselves. And then they could also, I think, request sort of the schedule that they wanted or update their availability.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, the, the effect wasn't small. I mean, they found a 7% increase in sales.

• 27:24Robin Rauzi?

  Oh, really?

• 27:24Speaker 03

  It's massive. Yeah, it was a massive effect. And this was 10 years ago that they found this effect. So that, that Gap study that was with a research team, it was a one-off project that was really... Related to research that they have done and are doing about shift work. Separately, there's a group at Harvard called the Shift Project. And they are doing more like active monitoring and measuring of shift work today. And they do lots of surveys and they created their own panel. And so it's, you know, there's multiple research teams looking at this. But the one that I think we pull a lot of work from today is the Shift Project.

• 27:58Robin Rauzi?

  They showed like employee satisfaction, was that the shift work? Employee satisfaction, the difference between Costco, which gives people really high advance notice and Dollar Store.

• 28:10Robin Rauzi?

  And it's like employee satisfaction is, you know, it's night and day. If you just have some predictability about what your work life is going to be like.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:18Robin Rauzi?

  Even if you don't have total control, just predictability.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel like that is a way to preempt the, but if we regulate workers and we take over business, the government regulation is going to cripple business. Like, rest assured, those of you who are like clutching your pearls with the thought that the government is going to instruct businesses on how to do their businesses, like, they will be fine. The benefit to businesses, I think, is like the cherry on top. This is just the right [BLEEP] thing to do. A computer program shouldn't set your schedule as if you're not a human being and end up with these really cruel, really cruel schedules. I mean, the consequences are things like, if you don't know your income in a month, you don't know what type of apartment you can rent or whether or not you can keep it. You can't get on government programs because then afterwards you're accused of fraud

• 29:05Speaker 03

  because you went on food stamps when you didn't have income for a month. And then the next month, your income was higher, but you couldn't get off the program because you didn't know what your income would be the following month. But then you get audited because you had a good work month. And then they say that this is an improper payment and they make you pay food stamps back because you earned more money than you said you did on your application. And now that, like, the consequences are so [BLEEP] severe if you do not know how much income you will get every two weeks.

• 29:31Robin Rauzi?

  You know, who actually did a study of income volatility related to hourly work is, of all people, J. P. Morgan Chase. And they found that the change in income from month to month. There was a 10% swing for 27% of workers that it would go down. And for 12% of workers, it was 10 to 30%. I mean, can you imagine your income varying 30% month to month? And you're trying to decide if you can make car payments?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the reason why JP Morgan Chase Institute did that study is because they have transaction level data in people's bank accounts that they're using as part of their research, not because they're like, I mean, JP Morgan Chase Research Institute does have a lot of really great researchers who are using this data to make a case for these things. But I, this is why I brought up the paid sick leave study. It is predictability in work or your ability to hold on to work that raises your income. The amount of money that the US economy is leaving on the table, because people who get at the bottom of a shift ROTA because of a computer said they weren't available when they should have been, end up having to switch jobs a lot more frequently. And so then they have gaps in employment. That's a huge hit to their income.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  That hit is like difference between like being eligible for public programs, you know, being able to make rents. It is such a bad, such a bad policy to allow companies to do this because it really just generates enormous harm in our economy.

• 30:57Robin Rauzi?

  Right, right. So we should then say that there have been Fair Work Week laws passed, most of them on the city and county level, though the state of Oregon has them. But we just got one in Los Angeles city and county in 2025. They are also in place in San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia. The nuances vary a little bit from place to place, but often what they say is you have to tell people their schedule two weeks in advance. Some of them say any hours you cancel, you have to pay 50% of the wage. Things like there has to be a 10-hour break between the end of one shift and the beginning of the next shift, thus ruling out clopening situations.

• 31:40Robin Rauzi?

  You know, these are not enormously radical proposals. And San Francisco, Seattle, New York, they all still have restaurants. They often do carve out some exception for small businesses that have maybe fewer than 50 employees or fewer than 10 employees, depending. But sometimes a company could say that it would create some sort of undue hardship on the company they might be able to appeal. I think the shortcoming in those laws is enforcement.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wait, no, can you confirm, does LA still have restaurants? I'm sorry, I wasn't really clear. I just went to New York and I ate at a restaurant there, but I haven't checked in like two weeks. So we don't know if they still have restaurants. I mean, the more pernicious employers are the big chains that would use this across all their sites.

• 32:26Robin Rauzi?

  Like Cheesecake Factory.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 32:28Robin Rauzi?

  So Chili's.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's going to be the big chain restaurants that have multiple locations where they're using software across like multiple stores. You know, for what it's worth, there is a bill in Congress set by two noted communists, Elizabeth Warren and Rosa Delora. And it is, the law is called like the Schedules That Work Act. And it's basically the Fair Work Week law on the federal level.

• 32:51Robin Rauzi?

  Last proposed, I think, before Trump was reelected.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Yes. The way that the law would work on the federal level is that it would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act so that part of the definition of fair labor standards that all companies have to follow is you have to have this type of notification system. I had like two different interviews on podcasts within like a week of each other where they asked me about policy in like the next administration. And I said, you don't have to wait. They said the same thing twice because I'm not creative. But the deficit is out of control, really and truly, as is the debt. And we have to do something about revenue if we want to do anything fun and liberal for the next 20 years. That is going to be an enormous fight.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  So if the Dems take control in the midterm elections this year, they have massive obstacles to actually doing the big, fun, liberal things that America wants them to do. Because those require money, and the federal government is very short on money.

• 33:51Robin Rauzi?

  There's also somebody sitting in the White House who's going to veto a bunch of stuff.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Especially if it dismantles any of his two signature legislations, which were both huge tax cuts.

• 34:00Robin Rauzi?

  Tax cuts.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  So what could Democrats do if they get to power?

• 34:03Robin Rauzi?

  In the meantime, sure.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  I said that they could do regulatory laws, right? It doesn't, like, there's no cost to the federal government to saying to employers, "You have to pay sick days to every single worker you have." It doesn't cost the federal government anything out of, like, revenue spending to say, like, "The minimum wage is now this, and we're going to pass a Fair Work Week law." And so I mentioned, like, to me, this is really like one of the few windows that Democrats have to make bigs, like, to do big policy moves that Americans really want, that would make a difference in people's lives pretty quickly, that wouldn't add to the federal budget. It's labor regulation, it's long overdue anyway, we should do this. Y'all, like, I'm not kidding, like, four days later, I was reached out to by congressional staff to be part, they were like, "We just wanted to ask you about, like, some priorities."

• 34:48Speaker 03

  And it was, they were literally asking me, like, "Of these, like, eight ways of amending labor law, which one do you think that Democrats should do first?" And I was like, "Oh, my God." It's not my idea. I think that I just, like, landed logically on the place that they landed on logically, that this is one of their few areas of movement.

• 35:09Robin Rauzi?

  It's not that our future is being determined by what podcasts people listen to, because that's terrifying.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, that's, no, that's probably also true. But I was like, "Of course, because they're Democrats, they're not, like, advertising this is what they would do if they took power." They're just, like, quietly reaching out to influencers to ask them, "Which one of these things would you do first?" I'm like, "Could you guys maybe put this on, like, a [bleep] billboard?"

• 35:33Robin Rauzi?

  Could you put it, could you put it on a platform? Could you, could you let some candidates know?

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Could you by any chance, like, I don't know why you're getting affirmation from me that yes, you're allowed to regulate the labor market. It's in fact in your power and interest to do so. And that of the American worker. All of this is really just a way to get back to, this is so fixable.

• 35:55Robin Rauzi?

  So fixable.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  That's the most frustrating part.

• 35:57Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, I mean, San Francisco, I think, put its law in place in 2014. So it was already a problem in 2014. The New York Times did a famous story in, I think, 2014 by Jodi Kantor, who did all the Me Too stuff, called Working Anything But Nine to Five. And it was about a woman who worked at Starbucks. And I think you could read it right now and it would not be that different for huge numbers of people, even though Starbucks said that they changed everything after that story ran. And she lost two places to live and not necessarily because of the variability in income. That was certainly part of it, but also just because of the enormous strain that it put on her personal life and her personal relationships, asking people to care for her son, for instance, because she had unpredictable shifts

• 36:42Robin Rauzi?

  and shifts all weekend. I mean, it's so fixable.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  It's so, it's so, it's so fixable. I mean, one of the researchers that was very pioneering in studying shift work, she was behind the Gap experiment. She has the critique that part of the problem in this not being fixed is because of basically like elite liberals not caring about the working class, that this is not a motivating issue for them, or that working class issues are not part of the key agenda for liberals. I, I don't know how right that is, or if you ever know how right that is. One of the things that I, I think about is that type of critique would make more sense if we have been like recently updating the Fair Labor Standards Act

• 37:29Speaker 03

  and like we keep leaving behind hours or keep leaving behind shift work. But really like, we haven't touched this law. They have not voted on it federally in Congress since 2007. So even though this feels like it's an obvious problem that has been around for decades, it has also been decades since we've touched the legislation that would dictate this. We haven't gotten overtime. We haven't gotten part time for people who, who work too much. We haven't gotten full time for people who work too little. We just haven't touched it at all. So I don't think that that holds water. But I do want to say, She

• 38:01Robin Rauzi?

  What's her name?

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Joan Williams. She has a point, which is that this group of people in shift work that we've been talking about the whole time, they're predominantly women of color.

• 38:11Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's kind of like the minimum wage when people are like, oh, it's just teenagers. It's not just teenagers. It's a lot of adult women of color who work in these jobs. It's like, there's like this side point here to think about in terms of representation, that almost every major researcher who has ever been in this field of studying or tracking or advocating for shift work is a woman. And if you look at the, like, press release from Elizabeth Warren and Rosa Delario saying, "We're gonna have this Schedules That Work Act," I mean, they are quoting the National Women's Law Center. And everyone they quote in this piece of, like, people who represent unions, people who, who have been part of, like, major malpractice lawsuits, every single one of them is a woman.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  I don't know if it's a class issue, but I know that it's a woman issue. And that women are driving this, women drove this research, they were like the first people to study and measure this problem. And I think about an issue like this, when you look at just these, like, really bleak statistics of women going into economics. And why diversity matters in these elite spaces is because, you know, the question is not obvious and it doesn't present itself. It's presented by the researcher. And this was a question that, like, female researchers have led in economics, in sociology, in social work and social welfare. This has been their campaign. I do have to shout out Lonnie Golden, who is probably one of the foremost advocates for part-time workers in the US.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  I would also be remiss if I didn't shout out that the Shift Project, the co-lead is, is a man's. I've been, I'm not trying to say that this is like an exclusively female space. I'm saying that it is led and dominated by female researchers. Whereas if you were to go look at, like, people who are advocating for manufacturing investment. Well, dudes.

• 40:02Robin Rauzi?

  Right.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  The good news is this is so fixable. The somewhat good reading of a bad situation is that it's not like we've had a lot of missed opportunities to get this done, since we haven't done anything really regulatory for workers since before I graduated college. Before the iPhone was first released. Like, we're in a whole era of not helping workers.

• 40:26Robin Rauzi?

  And I think that your point too, though, that this is a possibility to not just improve the lot of workers, but maybe even grow the economy, and to do it without big federal spending, also suggests that it's totally doable.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Totally doable. And, OK, Sophie, question from the chat. Is this just one of those things that you can just drop into the labor market? Yeah, 100%. Just like, boom, down it goes. Just Berlin airlift this labor regulation into the retail and leisure hospitality sector.

• 40:54Robin Rauzi?

  Right next to paid sick days.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so, I mean, all of this would all be the same thing, like mandatory paid sick leave for all workers, shift regulation, the regulation of overtime so that white collar workers can earn overtime again, the minimum wage. All of that is updating the same legislation, which is the Fair Labor Standards Act. So you'd have so much time.

• 41:14Robin Rauzi?

  You think they would do it all at once? I mean, I can never tell what's riskier. I guess that's a political question.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, God, I wouldn't know. Yeah. What gets Congress to do things? Does anybody have a clear idea? Not for the past 40 years. However we've been answering that question, we have not come up with the right answer. But if you had to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, you could really, like, squeeze a lot of stuff in there.

• 41:34Robin Rauzi?

  For sure.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  Push it in.

• 41:36Robin Rauzi?

  All right. We need to take a quick break, and we need to wrap this up.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 41:41Robin Rauzi?

  OK. And we are back with the less button-down Catherine Edwards.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  I can do the last part of the show as, like, serious economist Catherine.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Like executive orders, all of our petty shit that we pour out into the world. Yeah, so I think a problem that hits a lot of Americans is that when they go to check their credit card to see if it's been stolen, the charges are totally opaque because for whatever reason, it's like a hand-selected nickname by the seller that shows up on your account. Like, what is H Y dash dash dash Y Z Z? Oh, you didn't know that that was Home Depot? Weird. So my executive order would be, you need to give the full, real name of the outlet that you made a transaction at when it's listed on your credit card. It's so weird to me that I have to Google the random series of letters or nickname for an establishment

• 42:40Speaker 03

  that I made a transaction at, and yet they can charge me immediately. So yes, that's my executive order.

• 42:46Robin Rauzi?

  Okay, my executive order doesn't even sound remotely economic, but it is that lids on, especially foodstuffs, need to be small enough that women's hands can actually reach around them and grab them.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  How did this, how did this come up? Talk to me. What happened here? How normal-sized are your hands? Are they like, are they?

• 43:05Robin Rauzi?

  They're normal-sized.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  You've got good hands right there. High five.

• 43:09Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, yeah. Protein powders.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Oh, sure.

• 43:13Robin Rauzi?

  Like, things need to come in these, like, giant, it's like they're designed for not just man hands, like giant hands, that you can just barely, like, your only hope is, like, suction cup of your palm on the thing.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  I was thinking, like, big pretzel tubs, which I think says-

• 43:28Robin Rauzi?

  Yes, big pretzel tubs could be-

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Big pretzel tubs, protein tubs.

• 43:32Robin Rauzi?

  All right, smaller lids. Okay, spiritual sponsors. Okay, your spiritual sponsor is obviously-

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Obviously July 4th.

• 43:40Robin Rauzi?

  Which is, I'm glad you had a great time. I'm glad you had a great time.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Um, but my other spiritual sponsor is that the Washington Post put out what has to be, I don't even like using this word, the dumbest editorial I have ever read. I feel like I have a lot of education, and so I don't like using the words dumb or stupid. It's just like, I think it doesn't come from a good place. Like, don't use them in my vocabulary. This was a dumb-ass stupid editorial. All right, so the editorial was, and I'm getting to the spiritual sponsor part, but I read this and I was like, what the hell is happening? The headline is, "Lower Inequality Does Not Guarantee Better Democracy." Subhead, "UK Illustrates Why."

• 44:22Speaker 03

  Now, these absolute [bleep] clowns basically assert that the United Kingdom, over the course of this century, has worked very hard through things like labor regulatory policy to reduce income inequality in their country, and they have been very successful. Their assertion is that, one, the UK democracy is falling apart as a result, and, two, it's led to lower economic growth. I would say, like, what they say is, like, this has been bad for UK democracies because they've had a lot of prime ministers.

• 44:54Robin Rauzi?

  A lot of turnover in their prime ministership, yeah.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Through free and fair elections, mind you. And at no point in this editorial do they say the word Brexit.

• 45:04Robin Rauzi?

  Brexit?

• 45:05Speaker 03

  This was the craziest part.

• 45:07Robin Rauzi?

  Global financial crisis.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, the Great Recession financial crisis doesn't come up. Brexit doesn't come up. The pandemic also doesn't come up. Recession's don't come up. It's just that they raised the minimum wage, inequality is lower, and they don't like their prime minister, ergo, watch yourself, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, because you're gonna take American economy and democracy down with you if you raise the minimum wage. So I read this piece, I had to read it twice, because I was like, they can't, this is, this is the dumbest thing I've ever read. And then, my spiritual sponsor from the week is the comments section that has some absolute heroes making some amazing comments.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  I read them for almost a half hour, they just, they, like, delighted my soul.

• 45:56Robin Rauzi?

  I just read them over lunch.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  Oh, they're so good. My favorite one was, "I am a capitalist, but this editorial board's love of billionaires is pushing me towards socialism."

• 46:08Robin Rauzi?

  I like the one where the person used the Amazon AI tool to write a letter to the editor, pointing out all the things that didn't make any sense in his argument.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Oh, man. And I felt really seen here because I love the Washington Post coverage as a newspaper. I think they have great journalists. They do great coverage on issues I care about. They have a great economics team. Their federal government team is also good. And I think I, like a lot of readers, have been like, what is happening?

• 46:35Robin Rauzi?

  What has happened on the editorial page?

• 46:37Speaker 03

  So those people are there and they're commenting and it's just, you know, really warms my soul. So my spiritual sponsor for the week are all of the people who took the time out of their day

• 46:47Robin Rauzi?

  On July 3rd?

• 46:48Speaker 03

  On July 3rd to trash the Washington Post editorial board for what has to be one of the dumbest pieces of writing I've read in years. So yeah, thank you. Thank you, fellow disenchanted, Wapo angry readers who aren't going to give up on the journalists who work there but are absolutely going to take down the editorial board. I see you. I feel you. I'm one of you. You got me through the week.

• 47:10Robin Rauzi?

  Yeah, nice. So my spiritual sponsor is the new yoga studio that I have joined. I have been a yogi, God, I hate that, for 22 years. I've been doing yoga. This is the first time I've actually joined a yoga studio and I'm in that like early puppy love phase where I'm just like, and when is the next class? And when is the next class? It's really, um,

• 47:33Robin Rauzi?

  it has three locations and I can go to any of them. And I'm just, yeah, I'm really enamored of the new yoga studio.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 47:42Robin Rauzi?

  Eventually, we won't, there won't be time in my week to podcast because I'll just be doing yoga.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  Oh, that's fine. You can be a full-time yoga person and schedule us as needed.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  The Optimist Economy Podcast is edited by Sophie Laland. Our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson. Andy and Sophie make this podcast possible. Video clips from the show for you to share are available on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. And of course, t-shirts and tote bags are on our website, optimist economy.com. We are still taking suggestions for what the new shirts should say. Currently, I think my like, low-grade estimation is that I'd rather be consuming leisure is winning. But if you don't feel the same way.

• 48:29Robin Rauzi?

  I don't know, we've also got a lot of votes for iHeart statistical agencies.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  And then, of course, famously, not an economist.

• 48:35Robin Rauzi?

  Right, not an economist.

• 48:39Robin Rauzi?

  So hey, if you're on Substack, free or paid subscribers there can join the Optimist Economy chatroom. And if you have the means to contribute to this entire fire of a podcast, we're still taking your money at optimist economy dot com.