In a 2016 survey, nearly half of retail workers reported having to work on Thanksgiving, and big employers are far more likely to have their workers on duty than are smaller ones. Those who refuse or complain can face retaliation, leaving many to decide that putting up a fight isn’t worth seeing their hours cut or losing their jobs entirely.

Every year there are a flurry of stories that question whether that practice is worth denying workers a holiday at home. However, long holiday hours are just one of the myriad abuses employees face when it comes to their work schedules.

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Take, for instance, Aliyyah Miller, a housekeeping supervisor at a hotel in Philadelphia. She only receives her work schedule one day in advance, on Saturday for a workweek that begins on Sunday. “Literally, you know the day before which days you’re working,” she said. “You can’t make a doctor’s appointment because you don’t know if you’ll have the day off.”

The turnover at Miller’s hotel is high, and the housekeepers lose hours and income when they have to call out of shifts that conflict with their other responsibilities, thanks at least in part to the unpredictable nature of their schedules.

Nearly one in five workers experiences similarly unstable work hours, and those who are subjected to the worst abuses are disproportionately women and people of color, because they are more likely to work in the low-wage, part-time jobs that include the most haphazard scheduling.

Younger workers, too, are more likely to face abuses: According to research from the University of Chicago, nearly 40 percent of early-career workers receive one week or less of notice regarding their work schedules, with young part-time workers and workers of color experiencing rates even higher.

Other scheduling problems include the inability to ask for time off when it’s needed; split shifts, wherein workers have unpaid hours in the middle of their shifts; and being dismissed early when businesses isn’t high enough, meaning they aren’t paid for hours they were banking on. On-call work, when workers are put on notice that their services may be needed between particular hours, requires them to reserve time for which they may not be compensated.

The income volatility that comes with an unpredictable work schedule can lead to all sorts of adverse outcomes. After all, monthly bills stay the same no matter your hours, whereas service workers report weekly earnings fluctuating by 34 percent or more. Erratic schedules also make it difficult to commit to other paying work in order to make those ends meet.

Unpredictable scheduling also makes securing child care difficult, as it has to be done on short notice. It makes it harder for workers to access the health care system, as Miller noted, or to invest in themselves via more education, which requires predictability in order to choose and attend classes.

Unsurprisingly, then, workers who face schedule volatility are more stressed and experience more health problems, as do their children.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. When Miller previously worked as a kitchen manager, she knew that her staff members had lives outside of work. So she ensured they had regular schedules that were planned out ahead of time.

“We would rotate weekends and everyone had one day off during the week to take care of things,” she said. “I had zero turnover. Everyone was happy because they could attend to their children, they could have a life.”

Some national chains, such as Walmart and Starbucks,  have taken steps toward improving scheduling practices, even if they fall short of what workers and activists have demanded. According to a study done in 2015-2016 at Gap stores, more regular schedules result in more productivity and higher sales. That finding jives with other data showing pro-worker policies improve the performance of the businesses at which they work.

Still, fair scheduling isn’t common practice. So cities and states have stepped in.

San Francisco was the first locale to pass a fair work schedule law, followed by New York City, Seattle, Emeryville, California, and others. Oregon has a statewide fair scheduling law. Though they differ in the details, the general thrust of all of them is to provide workers with some level of predictability, including knowing their schedules more than a week in advance, and providing compensation for erratic or unfair scheduling, such as paying workers for some portion of their time if a shift gets canceled.  (There was also a federal bill introduced in 2017 by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that never received a vote in the Republican-controlled Congress.)

Miller’s home of Philadelphia could be next. At the end of the month, the city council is expected to vote on a measure that would require employers at large firms to give their workers 10-days notice of their schedules (increasing to 14 days in 2021) and for those firms to compensate workers for last-minute schedule changes. If it becomes law, the legislation is expected to affect about 130,000 workers. According to a 2018 survey by the Shift Project, a joint effort between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco, two-thirds of Philadelphia service sector workers report having unpredictable work schedules. More than a third say they receive less than one week’s notice regarding when they’re going to be on duty. Miller and her housekeeping staff, then, have a lot of company.

Philadelphia City Councilmember Helen Gym, who introduced the bill, described one Philadelphia worker she met who quit school because his ever-shifting schedule didn’t allow him to attend classes, and another who sat around all-day, paying for child care, while waiting for on-call hours that never materialized.

“I am trying to do more than pass a bill. I’m trying to change people’s understanding of a problem we’ve got and why this matters, and why this shouldn’t be left to the purview of the market,” Gym said.

No new law is going to help those employees who are stuck working on Thanksgiving this year, but far scheduling efforts like the one in Philadelphia can, hopefully, ensure that next year turns out better.

When my husband was away in Afghanistan for a year, I experienced what being a single mom was really like. Working, taking care of a household, and spending quality time with my toddler tested my patience at times. Now that he’s home, I still work hard to provide for my family and, although I can’t spend as much time with them as I want, I’m lucky to work a job with a paycheck and hours I can count on week to week. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everyone—too many mothers face a daily struggle of balancing caring for their kids and ever-changing work hours. 

According to a national study from the Center for Popular Democracy, moms either work too much or not enough. In both cases, most moms struggle in low-wage hourly jobs riddled with irregular work hours and unpredictable schedules. These moms are the women who serve your food at local restaurants, who are cashiers at the grocery store down the street, or are health care workers at a nursing facility. In fact, 61 percent of all women in the workforce nationwide hold hourly jobs. These jobs are often in low-wage yet fast-growing sectors such as health care, retail, and food service, and usually pay below $15.

What are the problems for moms working low-wage hourly jobs? As if facing inadequate and unaffordable childcare weren’t enough, these women also lack basic legal protections that would ensure they received adequate notice of their work schedules and the right to decline last-minute changes that throw carefully balanced routines into chaos. Unpredictable work hours are particularly challenging for the many moms who need to coordinate multiple part-time positions.

Fortunately, more and more working moms are coming forward to demand policy solutions that can make their lives less hectic. In Maryland, legislation introduced this year would require employers to post schedules three weeks out so parents could plan child care and other obligations. Under the proposal, workers would also be compensated for last-minute changes that could disrupt family events.

The proposal would also address a critical and underreported problem: the fact that many work part-time not by choice, but because they are forced into it. In fact, 1 out of 4 part-time workers would prefer to work full-time. Workers are often available to work but aren’t scheduled for more hours, often because even more part-time workers are brought on. Working fewer hours every week, in turn, often equates to a lower hourly wage and fewer opportunities compared to what a full-time counterpart receives. To address the dilemma, the legislation would give part-time workers access to full-time positions opening up at their jobs before a company could bring on more employees.

Although we sacrifice and work hard as mothers, many of us struggle. But even so, I wouldn’t trade being a mom for anything in the world—but a little help would be welcomed.

This Mother’s Day, a real gift would be a living wage with work hours we could count on. It’s time elected officials thought of moms across the state and enacted legislation that actually helps us in our day-to-day lives.

Now, that would be a gift worth giving.

Phone calls like the one I received from my manager were far from atypical in my job. In addition to last-minute cancellations, my coworkers and I would wait until Friday evenings to receive our weekly schedules—which would begin less than two days later, on Sunday mornings. Even when we received notice of our schedules later than Friday evenings, we still had to be on time if we were scheduled for the 6 a.m. markdown shift on Sunday. We might also discover that we would be working just 12 hours in a week, even though the previous week we had worked for 20.  Last August, a few months before I left, the company publicly announced that it would provide all employees their schedules 14 days in advance by early 2016. But my former coworkers tell me that they still receive their schedules just 48 hours before the workweek starts. The ugly reality is that corporate promises—even widely publicized ones—do not ensure change.

The scheduling practices that continue to threaten my coworkers’ ability to make ends meet are hardly unique to my former employer. In fact, schedule volatility affects a staggering 90 percent of the retail workforce. And for the 35 percent of these workers who are parents, fluctuating hours seriously impede their best efforts to secure high-quality child care.

The practice of on-call scheduling is particularly disruptive to work-family balance. Someone who is on-call has to sit in schedule purgatory until her manager either clears her to stay home or asks her to come in—which can happen with as little as two hours’ notice. If she can’t scramble to find child care in that time (a difficult task given the scarcity of accessible, affordable care in this country), she may have to take a disciplinary strike for failing to report to work. If she accumulates too many strikes, she can be fired. Informal consequences like reduced hours or inconvenient shifts are not uncommon either. Although some major retailers have announced plans to end on-call scheduling, many still expect their employees to report to work with little notice and at any time of day (or night).

To make matters worse, only a few states and localities protect parents’ ability to request time off to care for their children. As a result, in most places, employees can be fired when family responsibilities make them unavailable to work a shift. In November 2014, some year-round Kmart employees reported that they had to be available to work on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, or else risked termination. Even though child care on a federal holiday is nearly impossible to find, the ultimatum stood: work on Thanksgiving, or lose your job.

The result is that parents with unpredictable work schedules are much more likely to rely on home-based child care providers, relatives, or both. A patchwork of informal care arrangements can deprive children of the educational and developmental benefits associated with high-quality child care. Early childhood education is a springboard for educational attainment, economic mobility, and social well-being for children in low-income families. Yet, schedule instability in low-wage industries constrains parents’ ability to position their children for future success.

To help low-income parents afford child care, the federal Child Care and Development Fund provides billions of dollars in subsidies—but the program is far from perfect. It’s funded through block grants, meaning that states have the power to impose work requirements for parents who have no control over their hours; states can also make the application process cumbersome through requiring employers to corroborate parents’ schedules and income with additional documents. (It should be noted that none of these requirements exist at the federal level.) Conservative policymakers tout block grants as an ideal way to tailor policies to fit the unique needs of different states, but in reality, they keep high quality child care out of reach for many working parents.

But even when child care is affordable for retail workers, it often is unobtainable in practice. Just 3 percent of center-based child care providers are open on weekends, and even fewer are open after 7 p.m. Meanwhile, only 44 percent of retail workers work regular daytime hours, which leaves the majority of the retail workforce with very limited options for child care. To complicate things further, providers often require advance payment for full-time enrollment, which is often impossible for parents whose hours can fluctuate by 50 percent from week to week.

None of this is inevitable. Policies that recognize and empower working parents are crucial to reining in unchecked schedule volatility in the retail industry and beyond. The Schedules That Work Act, introduced in the Senate last summer, offers much-needed, common sense protections. The bill requires employers to modify schedules based on employees’ child care needs, and prevents employees who use their right to request schedule modifications from adverse outcomes like pay cuts and termination. It guarantees four hours of pay if workers are sent home early, and eliminates unpaid “on-call” shifts. Finally, the bill mandates employers to provide clear and advance notice of work schedules.

Overall, this legislation would make it easier for my former coworkers who are parents to provide their children with the long-term benefits of consistent, high-quality care. Retail workers are expected to take initiative and be proactive problem solvers—not only as workers, but also as parents. It’s only fair that the law require our employers to do the same.

Sure, the fact that Urban Outfitters and other retailers such as The Gap, J. Crew, Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret are nixing an abusive practice is laudable. In addition to heading off potential legal trouble, their decisions over the past several months demonstrate that companies are listening to the needs of their employees and the questions being raised by customers.

But let’s not let these headlines fool us into thinking that all is well in the retail industry. Despite Urban Outfitters abandoning the practice, many large profitable restaurant and retail chains continue to intentionally deny employees more hours and use scheduling systems that wreak havoc on their ability to take care of their families.

For example, it’s common for employees to find out whether or not they need to work a shift mere hours before they are scheduled to start. In fact, almost half of the service industry employees surveyed in Washington, D.C. reported that they first learned of their work schedules less than one week in advance. Nearly one-third received less than 24 hours’ notice of schedule changes.

And the problem goes beyond not knowing when you’ll work. It’s also about not knowing how much you’ll work. Plenty of companies force their employees to keep their schedules open with the possibility of being scheduled full-time, but then only assign and compensate workers for part-time hours. And being sent home before the end of a scheduled shift is then passed off as a natural part of the job.

These practices add a whole new level of volatility to people’s lives. Not knowing when you’ll work from week to week can make it difficult or men and women to arrange child care, pursue education or training, or hold down a second job to make ends meet. It’s also next to impossible to budget when you don’t know if you’ll be scheduled for 10 hours or 40, or if you’ll be sent home an hour early each day.

Luckily, we’re making strides so that the lives of the people who ring up our purchases and serve our food are less turbulent.

In San Francisco, community leaders, labor advocates and retail employees came together and enacted the first set of comprehensive and meaningful standards that would address this issue. Now, when an employer cancels an on-call shift with less than 24 hours’ notice, they must pay the employee two to four hours. The new rules also mandate that schedules are posted two weeks ahead of time and that the nation’s biggest and most profitable retailers must provide part-time employees with more access to hours before hiring additional part-time workers. Acknowledging that scheduling and hours are just part of the picture, the organizers of this initiative also worked to successfully raise San Francisco’s minimum wage to $15.

This victory has inspired similar efforts in Washington, D.C. and Massachusetts. On the national level, the Schedules That Work Act would ensure that everyone has the right to request a predictable schedule.

And so, as this momentum grows, business owners would be wise to look to their colleagues to see the benefits of consistent scheduling for both their employees’ livelihoods and their business’s productivity.

Take Costco: in addition to offering better rates of pay and benefits than competitors, it guarantees many part-time employees a minimum of 24 hours and provides two weeks of advance notice for scheduling. As a result of these policies, the company boasts one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry.

Small business owners have also adopted stable scheduling. Tony Lucca, the owner of two D.C. restaurants, gives his employees their schedule a month in advance and uses an online scheduling system that gives employees a say in when they work. And Gina Schaefer, the owner of a number of Ace Hardware stores in the District, makes sure shifts are made available to part-time employees first before hiring anyone new.

We know that it is possible for businesses to be productive while allowing their employees to lead stable, meaningful lives. So yes, let’s cheer on the companies who are ending on-call scheduling. But as Black Friday approaches, let’s not forget that the real change will come when all families in our community achieve the strong wages, reliable hours, and sane schedules that they need in order to build a good life.

The workplace stress and uncertainty that Jannette faces day-to-day is also felt by low-income working families across the US. Fluctuating work hours and limited resources make the daily demands of family life and trying to get ahead in the economy a constant challenge, creating anxiety as families simply struggle to stay afloat.

Through its research, Children’s HealthWatch, a national nonpartisan network of pediatricians and public health researchers, has documented that job security isn’t just an economic and lifestyle issue – it affects our physical health as well.  In our brief published today – Steadying the Foundation: Maternal Job Stability, Safety Net Programs & Young Children’s Health – we describe how job instability (defined as maternal job loss or reduced work hours) increases the risk of poor health for mothers and their young children.

In urban hospitals across the country, we interviewed more than 14,000 low-income working mothers with children under age four.  We found that 38 percent of these women had experienced job instability in the past year. Compared to stably-employed mothers and their children, mothers with job instability were more likely to have poor mental and physical health, and their children were significantly more likely to be in poor health and have developmental delays. Our research also found that job instability is linked to higher levels of material hardships such as housing insecurity (living in overcrowded conditions or moving frequently) and family food insecurity (when families lack sufficient food for all members to lead active, healthy lives).

While financial loss due to job instability can end up harming the health and development of young children, our research suggests two of the largest federal safety net programs – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Unemployment Insurance – can blunt the impact. The rate of child food insecurity – a severe level of food insecurity where children have to skip meals or go without eating for an entire day – was significantly lower for children whose mothers experienced job instability but also received SNAP, than it was for the children who did not receive SNAP.  In other words, SNAP helped to buffer children from the worst effects of job instability.

Unemployment insurance (UI) had a similar positive effect, stabilizing the housing of children whose mothers had lost a job. Families experiencing job loss who received UI were 27 percent less likely to be housing insecure than those families that did not receive UI.

Of course, no one wants to have to rely on public assistance as they juggle the demands of raising a family and inconsistent work hours or job loss. As Tianna Gaines-Turner, a member of Witnesses to Hunger in Philadelphia, puts it, “No one wakes up in the morning saying, ‘I think I want to lose my job today and go apply for government assistance and wait weeks for my unemployment to go through.’ No one wants that. But food stamps and other government assistance programs are important to help families who, through no fault of their own, end up unemployed and need a little extra help.”  She and her husband both work to support their three children but have struggled to escape poverty.

In response to the New York Times article, Starbucks has announced it would change the way it schedules its baristas in order to improve “stability and consistency.” Shifting towards a more manageable and family-friendly work environment is a good first step. However, there are other actions that policymakers should take to promote job stability and improve the health and self-sufficiency of low-income families.

First, increase the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, and index it to inflation to ensure its value does not erode in the future; also expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit to provide a critical boost to low-wage working families’ incomes. Second, ensure that the SNAP benefit is calculated based on the real cost of a healthy diet to help eligible families put more healthful food on the table.  Right now, it’s based on a plan that doesn’t match the costs of living for today’s working families. Third, permit “good cause” as a qualified reason for leaving a job under UI regulations.  Currently, many workers are ineligible for UI even if they have an unavoidable and justifiable cause for resigning, such as health problems or child care issues.  Lastly, strengthen the Family Medical Leave Act so that qualified workers receive up to 12 weeks of paid leave each year for the birth or adoption of a new child, serious illness of a family member, or a worker’s own medical condition.

This Labor Day, we should recognize the kinds of workplace practices and policies that allow families to lead healthy, productive lives with stability for their children.  The solutions are within reach – employers and policymakers can strengthen economic security for all working families.

When we talk about poverty it’s difficult to track—and give voice to—all of the different ideas around causes and solutions that need attention. Multiply those competing demands exponentially and you may get a feel for what working people in some of the fastest growing job sectors in our economy face every day.

Shift workers—especially those in the retail sector—are subject to unpredictable and erratic scheduling practices that make it nearly impossible to plan their lives and earn a stable income. An increasing number of these workers simply aren’t able to get the hours they need in order to support their families. They are essentially trapped in a cycle of poverty, with little time or resources to make any progress toward escaping it.

These are workers who aren’t living paycheck to paycheck; they’re living hour to hour.

How can people working under these conditions set a budget?  How do they schedule medical appointments or arrange care for their children?  In addition to dealing with their erratic schedules, retail workers are often required to be on call—making sure they are available without any guarantee of a shift.

So while increasing the minimum wage is indeed a critical step in the fight against poverty, it is just one piece of a much larger, broken system in the low-wage sector.

That’s why the Schedules That Work Act—introduced last month by Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), along with Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—is so critical. It would allow every worker to have a say in their schedules—whether someone is experiencing erratic shifts, or too many hours, or needs a schedule accommodation in order to meet an obligation. By giving workers the right to request a predictable or flexible schedule, this legislation would increase job quality in our country.

At the local level, city and state governments are also demanding that the largest, most profitable retail corporations do right by their workers.

Last week, Jobs With Justice San Francisco led a coalition of labor, community, advocacy and small-business groups in introducing a groundbreaking Retail Workers Bill of Rights ordinance. The measure, authored by San Francisco Board of Supervisors members Eric Mar and David Chiu, would create new protections for retail workers who are burdened with on-call scheduling and diminished hours. The ordinance would only apply to profitable, large chain retailers—banks, fast food and restaurant chains, department stores—companies that clearly have the means to improve labor standards. If adopted, the bill would require fair scheduling practices like advance notice, adequate on-call pay, and more opportunities for part-time workers to transition to full time-employment. It would also require employers to offer more hours to current part-time employees prior to hiring additional part-time staff.

Without these kinds of reforms to scheduling and hours in the low-wage sector, we will continue to have too many people working two and three jobs but stuck below the poverty line. Nationwide, nearly eight million people are involuntarily working part-time hours. That leaves them vulnerable to poverty—nearly one in four involuntarily part-time workers lives in poverty, compared to one in 20 full-time workers. These low-quality jobs also impact the broader community because employers shift costs—particularly for health care for their workers—to our already overburdened public systems.

We need 21st century policies to address the new 21st-century workplace. Efforts like the Schedules That Work Act and the Retail Workers Bill of Rights are more than just commonsense bills; they are innovative ways to address poverty and inequality in our communities.