The Scheduling Fix We Need
I carry my planner everywhere with me. Between juggling multiple jobs and being a single mom to my daughter, it’s a must-have for mapping out my life.
This week, I’ll work my full-time graveyard shift job from Monday to Wednesday and my other part-time job on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays — sometimes I’ll pick up an extra Monday shift. But if you were to turn back the pages of my planner to last month, you’d see a completely different schedule. That’s where it gets complicated.
My situation is more common than you might think.
About 17 percent of working Americans have unstable shift schedules, and half of those working low-wage jobs have nonstandard schedules. If you happen to be among the lucky with stable schedules, think about the little scheduling troubles you might experience every now and then: that 8am work meeting scheduled at 11:30 the night before, or the babysitter cancelling last-minute.
Now imagine those, constantly.
Because for that 17 percent, scheduling really is a constant battle. When my schedule was at its worst a few months ago, I was working five jobs at a time. My bosses would get mad when I couldn’t keep changing my schedule on demand. They’d even threaten to fire me. With unstable scheduling, things like affording rent or daycare become complicated math equations. How can you plan living like that? You really can’t.
And when you have someone depending on you for stability, scheduling takes an even bigger toll. I work like this so I can provide for my daughter. But in the process of juggling jobs, I don’t get to spend as much time with her as I’d like. Sometimes she’ll cling to my mom or dad more than me because she hasn’t seen me in so long, and it’s easy to feel guilty in those moments. Another example: I’ve been trying to potty train her recently. Where was I the first time she went by herself? On the way home from work. I might’ve been there to witness the milestone if my employer hadn’t recently changed our schedules by an hour.
Unfair scheduling should be considered a health issue too. My schedule has thankfully become more stable recently — I’ve started getting around 6 hours of sleep nowadays. But there were rougher months where I was always on go-mode, drinking Red Bull to get through the day and lucky if I could get a quick catnap on my lunch break between jobs. That’s not a sustainable way to live.
Some legislators have been working to fix this problem. The Schedules That Work Act, introduced in both the House and the Senate, is meant to address the chronic problems that people working hourly jobs face. It would let employees request schedule changes without any fear of being retaliated against, and it requires employers to grant scheduling requests unless they have a legitimate business reason for not doing so. It also provides employees with advance notice of their schedules and extra pay for on-call and split-shifts.
This shouldn’t be a controversial bill. Seventy two percent of Americans are in favor of chain stores and fast food restaurants giving their employees two weeks notice of their schedule. That statistic frustrates me for two reasons. The first is that our current policy doesn’t already reflect the belief of the overwhelming majority of people. Our legislators need to know that people are starving — people with good jobs that pay good wages are starving — because they don’t know when they’ll be scheduled to work those jobs. The second thing that frustrates me? I think that 72 percent should actually be a lot higher. That’s why I’m speaking out.
It can be difficult to talk about this — it’s personal. Talking about our children, our jobs, our money and our anxieties is always personal. But the best way to create change is to tell our stories. I’m sharing mine because I think it’ll make a difference.
— By Jasmine Simon as told to Maitreyi Anantharaman
