Why A Supportive Schedule Benefits Your Business

The key to controlling labor costs, goes the conventional wisdom, is to maintain a tight fit between labor supply and labor demand. To achieve this, waiters in some restaurants are sent home if the ratio of staff to customers exceeds 29% by 3 p.m., provided that ratio seems unlikely to drop below 21% by the end of the day. Store managers must maintain a predetermined ratio between employees' hours and store sales or traffic. Managers call several times a day, or even hourly, to notify supervisors the ratio they have to achieve. Sounds scientific.

What's unrealistic? Schedules change wildly from week to week: 60% of employees in one study reported that their schedules change "a lot" or "a fair amount" from week to week. One sales clerk's schedule was from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. one weekday; 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. another, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday. With her one-hour commute, she needed child care as early as 9 a.m. and as late as 10 p.m. She relied on her mother--her primary caregiver--and her son's paternal grandmother, her sister and her boyfriend to cover that week's shifts.

Some employees can never tell when they will get off work. Check processors are required to stay until the last check is processed, so their shifts can last anywhere from six to 10 hours. Hotels expect housekeepers to work six days a week, with frequent unplanned overtime in the summer, but few, if any, hours in winter.

Employees are often sent home after they arrive for work. If a flight is canceled, airline catering workers are sent home. Nurses' assistants arrive to find their shifts canceled if a hospital has fewer patients than expected. "I came all the way down here and I stay so far away! Then you tell me to turn around and go back home? ... I don't have money to be wasting like that!" said one worker.