About the Paper

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To evaluate the impacts of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling legislation on the work schedule experiences of Seattle workers, the researchers who developed this paper surveyed a set of workers paid by the hour and employed at businesses covered by the Secure Scheduling Ordinance. The researchers collected pre-implementation, baseline survey data from Seattle workers in the Spring of 2017. The researchers then collected follow-up survey data from Seattle workers between Fall of 2017 and Spring of 2018, after the law had gone into effect.

The paper describes the experiences of 755 Seattle workers before the Secure Scheduling Ordinance took effect as well as the experiences of 624 Seattle workers after the Secure Scheduling Ordinance was in place for a short period. The researchers compare the experiences of Seattle workers to that of 5,402 workers in comparison cities in the baseline period and 7,328 workers in comparison cities in the follow-up period. The researchers use this survey data to estimate the impact that the Secure Scheduling Ordinance had on several dimensions of the work schedule experiences reported by the workers themselves.

Research Questions

• Does secure scheduling legislation lead to an increase in the proportion of workers who receive two weeks’ notice of their work schedule?
• Does the legislation reduce on-call shifts, clopening shifts, and last-minute shift cancellations and schedule changes?
• Does the legislation increase the receipt of pay to compensate workers for on-call schedules, schedule changes, shift cancellations, or clopening shifts?
• Does the law increase “access to hours” by increasing offers of additional work hours before new workers are hired?
• Does the legislation affect the usual number of weekly work hours?

Key Takeaways

• The Secure Scheduling Ordinance significantly increased schedule predictability. For Seattle workers covered by the Ordinance, the share of workers receiving at least two weeks’ advance notice of their work schedules increased by 9.3 percentage points (a 20 percent increase compared with baseline).
• The Secure Scheduling Ordinance also increased predictability pay for schedule changes by about 7 percentage points (more than doubling the percentage of Seattle workers receiving pay for schedule changes compared with baseline).

Citation

Harknett, K., Schneider, D., Irwin, V. (2020). Evaluating the Impacts of the Seattle Secure Scheduling Ordinance. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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This study was part of CEO’s Labor Research and Evaluation Grants, and was produced outside of CEO’s standard research development process.