Temporal Autonomy: Schedule Instability as a Threat to Perceived Dignity in the U.S. Service Sector

The dignity of workers has long been a central concern of social scientists, with existing research documenting the variety of job conditions that threaten worker dignity. However, the literature on dignity at work has important limitations, including an overwhelming focus on older models of work (e.g., manufacturing), to the exclusion of the job conditions that are pervasive in the contemporary low-wage labor market, such as unstable and unpredictable schedules. Drawing on individual-level survey data on 17,791 service sector workers from the Shift Project, I test the association between schedule instability and perceived worker dignity, which I operationalize as perceived respect and recognition from supervisors, as well as how this varies by gender. Overall, I find that workers' schedule instability is significantly and negatively associated with perceived worker dignity. This holds for five just-in-time scheduling practices and for a schedule instability index that captures the cumulative effect of exposure to unstable scheduling. I also document gender differences in the association between schedule instability and perceived worker dignity. Specifically, I show that the consequences of schedule instability for perceptions of supervisor respect are more negative for women than men, which is, in part, driven by work-family conflict.