Mr. Justin Time Sets a Cruel Work Schedule

COLD OPEN

ROBIN: I feel like people hear “the other Kathryn” — the one who goes on Marketplace — and think, “Oh, that’s the serious economist.”

KATHRYN: Oh, yeah, that’s true — serious economist Kathryn. Thank you so much for having me. I’m here to talk about the labor market. It’s a shit show. Great, yeah. Hello.

ROBIN: Hello. Welcome back.

KATHRYN: And welcome back to Optimist Economy. I’m economist Kathryn Anne Edwards.

ROBIN: I’m editor Robin Rauzi.

KATHRYN: On this show, we believe the U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time.

ROBIN: We do. This week on Optimist Economy, we’re talking about sort of the flip side of unpaid overtime, which is underemployment.

KATHRYN: Underwork. Not working, not getting enough hours.

ROBIN: Bad scheduling.

KATHRYN: Scheduling stuff.

ROBIN: The unofficial title of this episode is “Shitty Schedules.” But I did change it to “Underwork.”

KATHRYN: We’re gonna land on something by the end.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

KATHRYN: A few announcements. Mine would be that we did a replay of one of our episodes from last season, and it included our favorite review of all time, from Johnny Five, which includes a shout-out to the tireless work Sophie puts in to make us sound like a real show. That reminded me — y’all, leave us a review. It can be instructive, and give us some tips, like, “Be sure to hit record, ladies, you’re doing it.” We love hearing from you, and we also love growing with your comments, even if it’s just laughing at how ridiculous they are.

ROBIN: That was the review that said something like, “Stay for the tire fire.”

KATHRYN: Yes, it was like, “This show is an assault on the medium.”

ROBIN: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.

KATHRYN: Johnny Five, if you’re out there, let us know what you think. Have we gotten better?

ROBIN: My announcement is I want to thank Hannah W. from Roselle, Illinois. She made a generous contribution to Optimist Economy through Benevity — a platform a lot of big companies use to let their employees donate to nonprofits. If you need information about Optimist Economy as a nonprofit, it’s all on our website. Just click Donate.

KATHRYN: Awesome.

RETCON

ROBIN: Retcon.

KATHRYN: Retcon. Checking in — America, in fact, turned 250 years old.

ROBIN: We did not prevent that from happening.

KATHRYN: There were some real close calls on the East Coast because of some pretty crazy storms, but everything went through.

ROBIN: Did seem that way.

KATHRYN: So how did you celebrate?

ROBIN: I was in Louisville, Kentucky, as I think I told folks. There was a good bit of bourbon involved. I discovered a terrific cocktail called Stings Like a Bee, because Muhammad Ali is from Louisville — it’s made with bourbon, hot honey lemon, and a ginger puree, shaken over ice, and it’s fantastic. So that was my celebration of America turning 250.

KATHRYN: I love it. So were you feeling optimistic? Did the episode settle with you? Did our conversation maybe turn you around a little bit? How’d we do?

ROBIN: I don’t know — I feel like 50% there. We did watch fireworks, but we didn’t go outside. I guess all I wanted to say about America 250 was, I’m sorry if I bummed everybody out before the holiday. I know some people wrote in comments that they felt a little more like I did, and were just kind of getting through that holiday.

KATHRYN: But all voices are welcome on the show, including bummer takes like Robin’s in the run-up to July 4th. But you know what? We had our nation’s cocktail, Stings Like a Bee, to help you out.

ROBIN: Don’t quote me on that. Yeah, exactly.

KATHRYN: We had a party, and we got a little in our heads about having people over to our house on July 4th in Houston without some kind of water feature, because it’s so ungodly hot.

ROBIN: ‘Cause you don’t have a pool?

KATHRYN: We don’t have a pool. So we ended up getting — I don’t think this is the branded name, so I don’t feel like we’re missing out on sponsor money — but we got Mount Splashmore. It’s about eight feet tall, almost like a bouncy castle slide with its own pool built in. So we basically spent money to get Mount Splashmore. And I think the most brilliant thing we did was set up our XL soccer tent, which we use for parties, over Mount Splashmore, so everyone was in the shade the whole time. Every parent who walked in looked at the slide, looked at the shade, and said, “Awesome.”

Oh, I wanted to tell you — I tried to watch Independence Day on the flight home, but it wasn’t available. So I watched Bend It Like Beckham.

KATHRYN: Wait, you hadn’t seen it before?

ROBIN: No, I’d seen it, but hadn’t seen it since it came out 20 years ago.

KATHRYN: And what did you think on the rewatch?

ROBIN: It holds up. It holds up.

KATHRYN: It really does.

ROBIN: I don’t want to tell you how much of that movie I could quote from memory, but if there was ever some high-stakes situation where the entire movie needed to be recited, I’d be ready.

KATHRYN: I’d give it a try.

I had one real retcon: we’ve talked several times on this show about job loss that could come from artificial intelligence, and I should admit that, especially in the first-season episode on AI, I treated with mocking disdain the way CEOs of AI companies talked about the effect of AI on our labor market — like, 80% of people wouldn’t have a job, and we’d need UBI because there was nothing else left. The Wall Street Journal reported just this week that most tech CEOs are rapidly walking back pretty much every job prediction they had.

ROBIN: Though it seemed to say they were walking it back because people are pretty hostile to hearing that’s what AI is going to do — not because they’ve actually genuinely changed their tune.

KATHRYN: We don’t know why they said it in the first place, so we don’t know why they stopped saying it. But one hypothesis the article put forward is that people hate AI, hate AI data centers, hate these companies, and hate that it could hurt the labor market — so maybe they figured they should stop bragging about it. The other part was the data story: they basically said, before their product even had users, years before it was released, that it was gonna wipe out all jobs. Now that companies are actually using them, they’re like, “This is crazy, but it made us more productive, and we hired more.” They no longer predict the end of the economy as we know it from their products. And I thought, well, so long as you got there, you made it to the party.

ROBIN: I mean, you did always wonder why they wanted to put on the outfit and dance around like a supervillain — it never made much sense. People have been predicting we’re gonna automate 20 to 80% of jobs since at least 2010, probably before that — long before large language models were even a thing. Automation has been discussed for ages, and I don’t know why these guys thought their automation would be different.

KATHRYN: I have so many thoughts and feelings on this, but I wanted to update our listeners: the impending economic doom that comes from a chatbot that makes it easier to book your vacation has been walked back some, by the people who sell it. So that’s good.

TERMS & CONDITIONS

ROBIN: OK, Terms and Conditions. Did you have one?

KATHRYN: I have one — it’s called Just in Time. Just in Time started as a manufacturing production model in Japan. It was pioneered at Toyota. Coming out of World War II, Japan didn’t have a lot of money or resources — the country was flattened in so many ways. To build out and expand their production and manufacturing base, they had to cut out as much waste as possible. So the idea of Just in Time was developed by some guy at Toyota — I don’t know his actual job, but he’s probably really important — who basically said: we should only order parts as we need them. We shouldn’t put in a bulk order for things assuming they’ll be purchased. We should try to make the production process as lean as possible. That led to the idea of lean manufacturing, but it also led to the use of “just in time” to describe a philosophical approach to resources — as an employer or company, reducing waste at all costs. The North Star of Just in Time is: trim the fat, no waste.

One of its more pervasive uses today is on scheduling. A hundred years ago, the question of when you need a staff member at a store was simply, “I need staff for when it’s open and enough to do the work.” Now it’s a complex computer program that uses everything from the weather to how many people came into the store last year to build a just-in-time scheduling model, trying to right-size the exact number of people working at a store at any given time.

ROBIN: Exactly. Which could be used for good or used for evil.

KATHRYN: Guess which one they use it for?

ROBIN: My term and condition is a word that pretty much defines itself: clopening. That’s when you’re asked to work a shift where you close the night before and then open the next morning. It’s particularly onerous if you work in food service, where you might be at a fast food restaurant until 10 o’clock at night, then back to open the store at 6:00 the next morning — so you’re there at 5:00.

KATHRYN: Clopening is a function of Just in Time, because the computer doesn’t think workers need eight hours of sleep between shifts. Okay, Sophie’s thinking of him as the bad guy: Mr. Justin Time.

ROBIN: Mr.—

KATHRYN: I’m okay with anthropomorphizing Just in Time as a person: Mr. Justin Time. Okay, we’ll be back with the centerpiece — on scheduling.

CENTERPIECE

KATHRYN: And we’re back. I tried to say it while Robin was—

ROBIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see what you did there.

KATHRYN: All right, we’re here talking about hours, and how those hours are scheduled for people who don’t get enough of them.

ROBIN: I’ve wanted to do this for a while, because to me this is an enormous problem with what seems like a reasonably easy fix — one that journalists have been writing about for more than a decade, and that still persists. While upper-middle-class people are busy running around saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all work 32-hour workweeks?” or “Everybody should have the right to work part-time,” the people who actually work part-time get screwed, most of them. First of all, if you work part-time, you get paid less for the exact same job, by and large — and that doesn’t even include the fact that you may not be eligible for benefits. That’s just hourly wages being lower.

But also — and this is something I was late to understanding myself — the variability in people’s income from week to week is much more significant than we realize. It’s not because they lose jobs or have sporadic jobs; it’s often because they get scheduled in totally random ways, where they may work 30 hours one week and eight the next. It’s also hard to track — there’s no easy way to get a line of sight into what companies are doing and the effects it’s having. So researchers seem to be trying to pull together all these threads, and occasionally the BLS says, “No, it’s not really a problem, we’re not seeing more of this,” or “These numbers are pretty steady.” And yet we know people are really suffering from income volatility and low-wage work made even worse — their lives made unsustainable — by the unpredictability of their schedules.

KATHRYN: Mm-hmm.

ROBIN: Anyway, that was just my little rant about why I wanted to do this — I was sort of surprised we hadn’t gotten to it yet.

KATHRYN: Yeah. We did an episode before, in the first season, on how the right to work part-time would probably create a lot of employment in the U.S., because there are people for whom meeting a full-time schedule isn’t possible. It’s like there’s this flip side to labor market regulation: some people work too much, don’t get overtime, aren’t regulated, and need to be able to work less. And then you have people who don’t work enough — they also need to be regulated into a more reasonable schedule, because most people don’t really want to... they just want to work in a predictable way where they can live a normal life. You can’t do that if you’re totally married to your job, in person five days a week, working 60 hours without overtime — and you also can’t do that if you don’t get enough scheduling. So scheduling laws are a two-way street: both the high-income, high-hour workers and the low-income, low-hour workers need scheduling protection. It just needs to look really different for each.

ROBIN: Right. You’ve talked about the idea that people should have the right to request to work part-time. There was an op-ed on this — I think in the spring, in The New York Times, by folks at the People’s Policy Project — that argued part-time workers should have the right to request full-time work, particularly before an employer goes and hires more part-time workers.

KATHRYN: Yes. So here’s how it shakes out. First off, part-time workers are paid less, and they have the scheduling variability that relates to volatility in income — but it’s really hard to track the size of the problem. So let’s start with measurement.

The BLS surveys employers about jobs and households about work — which sound the same, but really aren’t. They’re two separate things. Employers report on jobs and hours; workers report on their own hours. On the employer side, we get data on average weekly hours across every industry, and across all jobs in the U.S. it sits just under 35 hours per week — in part because the average includes all part-time workers and part-time jobs. Because this is broken out by industry, we can see where part-time jobs are concentrated, and they’re not randomly scattered throughout the economy. In retail trade, for example, average hours across all jobs is 30 hours per week. In leisure and hospitality, it’s 25 hours per week — which is a lot of restaurants.

ROBIN: That’s what I was going to ask — are restaurants in leisure and hospitality?

KATHRYN: Leisure and hospitality is hotels, performance venues, sporting venues, movie theaters, and anywhere you go to eat food on-site. It also includes my favorite establishment type in the entire U.S.: drinking places. They’re not called bars — in the industrial code, it’s “restaurants and drinking places.” Those drinking places can serve adult beverages, but there’s no official category called “bars.” It’s just “drinking places.”

ROBIN: So Starbucks is like a drinking place without adult beverages, and then there are drinking places with adult beverages that are—

KATHRYN: Yes — Starbucks might actually count as a restaurant. That’s a great question. I’ll do a retcon next time on whether Starbucks is a restaurant or a drinking place. But leisure and hospitality is hotels and entertainment venues plus every restaurant. That’s 25 hours a week.

ROBIN: And that’s average, not median, I should say.

KATHRYN: Right — which would mean there are entire industries in the U.S. where your typical employee is working part-time.

ROBIN: Yeah. And if that’s the average, there are lots of people working far less than that.

KATHRYN: Yes, there are lots of people working far less than this. So that’s premise one: there are industries that rely on part-time workers. The corollary is that there are lots of ways people group the U.S. economy that the BLS doesn’t. There’s no “tech sector” — we have information, financial activities, professional and business services, and some of those get colloquially called the tech sector, but there’s no official definition. Same thing here: we know there are lots of shift workers in retail trade and leisure and hospitality, but there’s no occupational category of “shift work,” no industry called “the shift sector.” When we think of the shift sector, we’re often thinking about retail trade, leisure and hospitality, and then it picks up professional and business services — janitorial staff, for instance.

The reason people get really dissatisfied with the BLS here is that, in the household survey, you’re asking people, “How much do you work?” And the BLS tends to label people as part-time if their total hours across all jobs are part-time.

ROBIN: So they might have multiple part-time jobs but be working 50 hours a week?

KATHRYN: Yeah — officially, per the BLS, you’re a part-time worker if you work up to 34 hours. And the number of part-time workers ends up smaller through this count — you end up with around 22 million right now.

ROBIN: It winds up being smaller than it probably is in actuality. I don’t know exactly how to put this — their number is their number — but more people feel like they work part-time jobs than are reflected in that count. Is that what you’re getting at?

KATHRYN: Yeah, because you’re going to have roughly eight to nine million people who work multiple jobs in the U.S., and most multiple-job holders are holding two part-time jobs. So part of it is multiple job-holding, and the other part is that “one to 34 hours” is a pretty opaque category. That’s dissatisfaction part one.

The other dissatisfaction is that the BLS identifies part-time work as being for “economic” or “non-economic” reasons. Part-time for economic reasons covers people who report they didn’t work more than 35 hours last week for some economic reason — meaning they couldn’t find full-time work, or there was business slack. Part-time for non-economic reasons, unfortunately, includes a lot of things people would see as similar to an economic reason.

ROBIN: Like — I got hired, and they only scheduled me for this many hours?

KATHRYN: Right — or some type of constraint, like: full-time at this job is less than 35 hours. They don’t have people who work 40 hours a week; that’s just what “full-time” is for this job. That’s one of the fastest-rising categories of part-time employment — basically, there is no full-time equivalent. It’s called a “short week” job. Then people will also say they have family obligations, childcare constraints, or they’re in school or training, so they can’t work full-time. So these non-economic reasons end up getting conflated into “people who wanted to be part-time,” even though there are lots of people in that category who probably would want more hours. That’s what ends up being the big dissatisfaction with the BLS’s measurement — it’s measuring accurately, but it’s missing the problem.

ROBIN: Right. Could that be fixed? Or are we just locked into measuring it this way?

KATHRYN: No, it could be fixed. They’ve done surveys that supplement the regular one — there’s a survey they ask every month called the Basic Monthly, and then they add supplements on a rotating basis. One of them is the Contingent Worker Survey, or the Work Scheduling Survey, which gets a lot more information about this. Changing the core survey doesn’t happen often — they could change it to reflect this, they just don’t do it that often. It takes money to change the survey, and the agencies don’t have a ton of it, but they’re also very adherent to consistency. So you end up with private researchers coming up with other ways of getting at the variability — and these people do a great job.

ROBIN: Are you talking about the people at The Shift Project?

KATHRYN: Yes, one of them is The Shift Project. Some of the ways we’ve gotten at this idea of involuntary, erratic scheduling comes from other surveys you can use to find out about irregular shifts and notification. But the flagship right now is The Shift Project out of Harvard, which asks shift workers about their schedules and work arrangements.

ROBIN: Yeah, they do some really interesting surveys — the one I was reading last night was about instability in scheduling: how far in advance do you even know your schedule?

KATHRYN: Yes — 40% of shift workers will say they don’t know it a week in advance. It’s scheduling that treats workers’ shifts like a cog in a machine.

ROBIN: Yeah — I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m gonna. It’s also a system where, when you’ve got a company where the cost of labor is a huge input, the ability to squeeze 5 or 10% out of your largest cost center is something companies want to do. Walmart, for instance, went from being an 80% full-time company — 20% part-time workers — to now having more than 40% part-time workers. That was a deliberate choice, to build in the cost flexibility and time flexibility that served Walmart, and treated its workers like, as you said—

KATHRYN: Inhuman cogs. Like, you’re not a person, you don’t have a life, I don’t respect you, you’re just a shift to be scheduled. And the implications aren’t just on the scheduling side — your shift can be canceled when you show up.

ROBIN: Yeah, or you get sent home.

KATHRYN: You get sent home early, you’re asked to stay late. You don’t know when you’re going to work. You don’t know if your shift will still be your shift when you show up, and you don’t know if it’ll just not happen at all, end early, or run late.

ROBIN: Oh, my favorite is the on-call shift — where you’re not working at all, or getting paid, but you’re supposed to sit around and make yourself available in case they need you.

KATHRYN: And if you’re on call and they call you and you aren’t available, you’re either fired or you move to the bottom of the rota. We talked about this in the paid sick leave episode — one consequence of a shift-scheduling system like this is that you basically have a rota. In the old days, it was the guy who ran the bar calling his regulars. But when a computer algorithm sets it, you get marked as unreliable and moved to the bottom of the pile — so you either get fewer shifts, no shifts, or the worst shifts. You end up with situations like: I was working 35 hours a week, but I missed an on-call, and now I haven’t worked more than 10 hours over the past month. That’s one of the reasons paid sick leave laws ended up being such a boost to workers’ income — if they didn’t have a college degree and were women with kids at home, they were less likely to miss shifts because of a sick kid, or employers weren’t allowed to be retributive if they missed a shift, so they were able to maintain stable employment.

ROBIN: Yeah — there’s absolutely, with part-time work, the ability to punish people by just reducing their hours. It’s probably illegal, but it absolutely happens.

KATHRYN: Yeah — and if you wanted proof that you can use an algorithm to set your labor and have it do so in an incredibly cruel way, here it is. I’m sure these just-in-time models are all relying on AI now. Now, the real question is: are they even saving money? If this is a company’s biggest cost, and this is a way to save on it — is this just what the future of work looks like? Of course it isn’t. If you treat people like garbage, they don’t work as well — and you can actually run an experiment to prove it, which is what a group of researchers did.

They didn’t name it at first, but The Gap partnered with a research team to run a nine-month experiment where half of the stores were given predictive schedules, and the other half were given basically just-in-time, randomly set, unpredictable schedules. The name of the report — like, tell me an economist wrote this without telling me — is “Stable Scheduling Increases Productivity and Sales.” It’s called the Stable Scheduling Study.

So basically, they partnered with The Gap to test whether predictive scheduling is better for the bottom line than just-in-time scheduling. They did a pretest first, and in the pretest, Gap was like, “Maybe there’s something to what you’re saying,” and ended up changing some scheduling practices before the experiment even began — so they didn’t do a full experiment on every one of these horrible scheduling practices, because two of them Gap did away with before the study even started. Then they ran the study, and one of the things they tested was tech-enabled shift swapping. They had something called Shift Messenger — if someone couldn’t make a shift, rather than reporting it up to the algorithm, they’d message each other: “Does anybody want this shift?” And it let workers swap shifts easily.

ROBIN: I just read they did a similar study at IKEA with shift workers — they were using one of the just-in-time systems. In that case, I think Kronos was the company that built the software so people could do exactly what you’re describing, but manage it themselves, and also request the schedule they wanted or update their availability.

KATHRYN: Yeah, exactly. And the effect wasn’t small — they found a 7% increase in sales.

ROBIN: Oh.

KATHRYN: It’s massive. It was a massive effect, and this was 10 years ago that they found it. That Gap study was a one-off project, related to research the team has done and continues to do about shift work. Separately, there’s a group at Harvard called The Shift Project, doing more active monitoring and measuring of shift work today — lots of surveys, their own panel. There are multiple research teams looking at this, but the one we pull a lot of work from is The Shift Project.

ROBIN: Oh, yeah — they showed employee satisfaction data, right? The difference between Costco, which gives people a lot of advance notice, and Dollar Store — employee satisfaction is night and day. If you just have some predictability about what your work life will be like — even without total control — just predictability.

KATHRYN: I feel like that’s a way to preempt the “but if we regulate workers and take over business, government regulation is gonna cripple business” argument. Rest assured, those of you clutching your pearls at the thought of government instructing businesses how to run things — they’ll be fine. The benefit to businesses is the cherry on top. This is just the right fucking thing to do. A computer program shouldn’t set your schedule as if you’re not a human being and end up with these really cruel schedules. The consequences are things like: if you don’t know your income in a month, you don’t know what apartment you can rent, or whether you can keep it. You can’t get on government programs, because afterward you’re accused of fraud — you went on food stamps when you didn’t have income for a month, then the next month your income was higher, but you couldn’t get off the program because you didn’t know what your income would be the following month. Then you get audited because you had a good work month, and they call it an improper payment and make you pay food stamps back because you earned more than you said on your application. The consequences are so fucking severe if you don’t know how much income you’ll get every two weeks.

ROBIN: You know who actually did a study of income volatility related to hourly work? Of all people, JPMorgan Chase. They found that the month-to-month change in income was a 10% downward swing for 27% of workers, and a 10-to-30% swing for 12% of workers. Can you imagine your income varying that much month to month while you’re trying to decide if you can make your car payment?

KATHRYN: The reason JPMorgan Chase Institute did that study is that they have transaction-level data in people’s bank accounts as part of their research — and the JPMorgan Chase Institute does have a lot of really great researchers using this data to make a case for these things. This is why I brought up the paid sick leave study: it’s predictability at work, or your ability to hold onto a job, that raises your income. The amount of money the U.S. economy is leaving on the table because people who end up at the bottom of a shift rota — because a computer decided they weren’t available when they should’ve been — end up having to switch jobs a lot more frequently, and then they have gaps in employment that are a huge hit to their income. That gap is the difference between being eligible for public programs and being able to make rent. It’s such a bad policy to allow companies to do this, because it generates enormous harm in our economy.

We should say there have been fair workweek laws passed — most of them at the city and county level, though the state of Oregon has one too. We just got one in the city and county of Los Angeles in 2025. They’re also in place in San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

ROBIN: The nuances vary a little from place to place, but often what they say is: you have to tell people their schedule two weeks in advance; any hours you cancel, you have to pay 50% of the wage; there has to be a 10-hour break between the end of one shift and the beginning of the next, which rules out clopening. These aren’t enormously radical proposals — San Francisco, Seattle, and New York all still have restaurants. They often carve out exceptions for small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, or fewer than 10, depending on the city, and sometimes a company can appeal by arguing undue hardship. I think the real shortcoming in those laws is enforcement.

KATHRYN: Yeah. Wait — can you confirm, does L.A. still have restaurants? I just went to New York and ate at a restaurant there, but I haven’t checked in like two weeks.

ROBIN: We should call someone.

KATHRYN: But the more pernicious employers are the big chains that use this across all their sites—

ROBIN: Like Cheesecake Factory. Sorry.

KATHRYN: Yeah, it’s gonna be the big chain restaurants with multiple locations, using software across multiple stores. For what it’s worth, there’s a bill in Congress — sponsored by two noted communists, Elizabeth Warren and Rosa DeLauro—

ROBIN: Yeah.

KATHRYN: — called the Schedules That Work Act. It’s basically the fair workweek law at the federal level.

ROBIN: It was last proposed, I think, before Trump was reelected. The way the law would work federally is that it would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, so that part of the definition of fair labor standards that all companies have to follow is that you have to have this type of notification system.

KATHRYN: I had two different podcast interviews within a week of each other where they asked me about policy in the next administration, and I said the same thing both times, because I’m not creative: the deficit is out of control, really and truly, as is the debt, and we have to do something about revenue if we want to do anything fun and liberal for the next 20 years. That’s gonna be an enormous fight. So if the Dems take control in the midterms this year, they have massive obstacles to actually doing the big, fun, liberal things America wants, because those require money, and the federal government is very short on it.

ROBIN: There’s also somebody sitting in the White House who’s gonna veto a bunch of stuff. But OK.

KATHRYN: Right, if it dismantles either of his two signature pieces of legislation, which were both huge tax cuts. So what could Democrats do? Regulatory laws. There’s no cost to the federal government in telling employers, “You have to pay sick days to every worker.” It doesn’t cost the federal government anything out of revenue spending to say, “The minimum wage is now this,” or “We’re gonna pass a fair workweek law.” So to me, this is really one of the few windows Democrats have to make big policy moves that Americans really want — that would make a difference in people’s lives pretty quickly, without adding to the federal budget. It’s labor regulation. It’s long overdue anyway. We should do this. I’m not kidding — four days after I said this in an interview, I was contacted by congressional staff who wanted to ask me about priorities. They were literally asking, “Of these eight ways of amending labor law, which one do you think Democrats should do first?”

And I was like, “Oh my God” — it’s not my idea, I think I just landed logically on the same place they did.

ROBIN: It’s not that our future is being determined by what—

KATHRYN: No, no, no — that’s probably also true. But I think I logic-ed my way into something they’d already logic-ed their way into, because they’re Democrats — they’re not advertising what they’d do if they took power. They’re just quietly reaching out to influencers to ask which of these things they’d do first. I’m like, could you guys maybe put this on a billboard?

ROBIN: Could you put it on a platform? Could you let some candidates know?

KATHRYN: I don’t know why you need affirmation from me that yes, you’re allowed to regulate the labor market — it’s in fact in your power and interest to do so, and in the interest of the American worker. But all of this is really just a way of getting back to: this is so fucking fixable.

ROBIN: So fixable.

KATHRYN: That’s the most frustrating part.

ROBIN: Yeah. San Francisco put its law in place in 2014, so it was already a problem then. The New York Times did a famous story in 2014, by Jodi Kantor — who later did all the Me Too reporting — called “Working Anything But 9 to 5,” about a woman who worked at Starbucks. You could read it right now and it wouldn’t be that different for huge numbers of people, even though Starbucks said they changed everything after that story ran. She lost two places to live — not necessarily because of the variability in income, though that was certainly part of it, but because of the enormous strain it put on her personal life and relationships, asking people to care for her son because she had unpredictable shifts, including shifts all weekend. It’s so fixable.

KATHRYN: It’s so fixable. One of the researchers who was pioneering in studying shift work — she was behind the Gap experiment — has a critique that part of the reason this hasn’t been fixed is that elite liberals don’t care about the working class; that it’s not a motivating issue for them, or that working-class issues aren’t part of the key agenda for liberals. I don’t know how right that is. One thing I think about is that critique would make more sense if we’d been recently updating the Fair Labor Standards Act and kept leaving behind hours, or shift work. But really, we haven’t touched this law — Congress hasn’t voted on it federally since 2007.

ROBIN: So even though this feels like an obvious problem that’s been around for decades, it’s also been decades since we’ve touched the legislation that would fix it.

KATHRYN: We haven’t gotten overtime fixed. We haven’t gotten part-time protections for people who work too much, or full-time for people who work too little. We just haven’t touched any of it. So I don’t think that critique holds water entirely. But I do want to say she has a point — Joan Williams has a point — that this group of shift workers we’ve been talking about the whole time are predominantly women of color. It’s kind of like the minimum wage debate, where people say, “Oh, it’s just teenagers” — it’s not just teenagers, it’s a lot of adult women of color working these jobs. There’s also this side point about representation: almost every major researcher who’s ever studied, tracked, or advocated for shift work is a woman. If you look at the press release from Elizabeth Warren and Rosa DeLauro announcing the Schedules That Work Act, they’re quoting the National Women’s Law Center, and everyone they quote — people who represent unions, people who’ve been part of major lawsuits — every single one is a woman. I don’t know if it’s a class issue, but I know it’s a women’s issue driving this. Women drove this research — they were the first people to study and measure this problem.

I think about an issue like this against the really bleak statistics on women going into economics. Diversity matters in these elite spaces because the question isn’t obvious — it doesn’t present itself. It’s presented by the researcher, and this has been a question that female researchers have led in economics, sociology, social work, and social welfare. I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out Lonnie Golden, probably one of the foremost advocates for part-time workers in the U.S. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note that the co-lead of The Shift Project is a man — I’m not saying this is an exclusively female space, I’m saying it’s led and dominated by female researchers. Whereas if you look at people advocating for manufacturing investment—

ROBIN: Right.

KATHRYN: — it’s a lot of dudes.

ROBIN: Right, right.

KATHRYN: The good news is this is so fixable. The somewhat good reading of a bad situation is that we haven’t had a lot of missed opportunities to get this done, because we haven’t done anything really regulatory for workers since before I graduated college — before the iPhone was even released. We’re in a whole era of not helping workers.

ROBIN: And I think your point too — that this is a chance to not just improve the lot of workers, but maybe even grow the economy, and to do it without big federal spending — suggests this is totally...

KATHRYN: Totally doable. Okay, Sophie, question from the chat: is this just one of those things you can drop into the labor market? Yeah, 100%. Just Berlin-airlift this labor regulation into the retail and leisure and hospitality sector. All of this — mandatory paid sick leave for all workers, shift regulation, restoring overtime so white-collar workers can earn it again, the minimum wage — all of it is updating the same piece of legislation: the Fair Labor Standards Act.

ROBIN: You think they’d do it all at once? I can never tell what’s riskier — I guess that’s a political question.

KATHRYN: Oh, God, I wouldn’t know. What gets Congress to do things? Does anybody have a clear idea? Not for the past 40 years. However we’ve been answering that question, we haven’t come up with the right answer. But if you amend the Fair Labor Standards Act, you could squeeze a lot of stuff into it.

ROBIN: All right, we need to take a quick break, and then we need to wrap this up.

EXECUTIVE ORDERS

ROBIN: And we’re back with the less buttoned-down Kathryn Edwards.

KATHRYN: I could do the last part of the show as serious economist Kathryn, but — executive orders, all the petty stuff we pour out into the world. So, I think a problem that hits a lot of Americans is that when they check their credit card statement to see if it’s been stolen, the charges are totally opaque, because for whatever reason it’s some hand-selected nickname by the seller that shows up on your account. Like, what is “HY---YZZ”? Oh, you didn’t know that was Home Depot? Weird. So my executive order is: you need to give the full, real name of the outlet where a transaction was made, when it shows up on your credit card. It’s so weird that I have to Google some random string of letters to figure out where I made a transaction, and yet they can charge me immediately.

ROBIN: OK, my executive order doesn’t even sound remotely economic, but: lids — especially on food products — need to be small enough that women’s hands can actually reach around them.

KATHRYN: How did this come up? Talk to me. What happened here? How abnormal are your hands? Those look good, actually — high five.

ROBIN: Protein powders. They come in these giant tubs that seem designed for not just man hands, but giant hands — your only hope is to suction-cup your palm on the thing.

KATHRYN: I was thinking big pretzel tubs.

ROBIN: Yes, big pretzel tubs, could be protein — sure. All right: smaller lids.

SPIRITUAL SPONSORS

KATHRYN: Okay, spiritual sponsors.

ROBIN: Your spiritual sponsor is obviously—

KATHRYN: July 4th.

ROBIN: Which — I’m glad you had a great time.

KATHRYN: My other spiritual sponsor is that The Washington Post put out what has to be — I don’t even like using this word, because I don’t think it comes from a good place, but — the dumbest editorial I have ever read. The headline is “Lower Inequality Does Not Guarantee Better Democracy.” Subhead: “UK Illustrates Why.” These absolute clowns basically assert that the United Kingdom, over the course of this century, has worked very hard through things like labor regulatory policy to reduce income inequality, and has been very successful — and that, one, UK democracy is falling apart as a result, and two, it’s led to lower economic growth. What they say is that this has been bad for UK democracy because they’ve had a lot of prime ministers—

ROBIN: A lot of turnover in the prime ministership—

KATHRYN: — through free and fair elections, mind you. And at no point in this editorial do they say the word—

ROBIN: Brexit.

KATHRYN: Yeah — the Great Recession and financial crisis don’t come up, Brexit doesn’t come up, the pandemic doesn’t come up. It’s just: they raised the minimum wage, inequality is lower, and they don’t like their prime minister — ergo, watch yourself, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, because you’re gonna take American democracy down with you if you raise the minimum wage. I had to read this piece twice, because I kept thinking, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.

My spiritual sponsor for the week is the comments section, which had some absolute heroes making amazing comments — I read them for almost half an hour, and they delighted my soul. My favorite: “I am a capitalist, but this editorial board’s love of billionaires is pushing me towards socialism.”

ROBIN: I liked the one where someone used an Amazon AI tool to write a letter to the editor pointing out everything that didn’t make sense in the argument.

KATHRYN: Oh man. I felt really seen, because I love The Washington Post as a newspaper — great journalists, great coverage on issues I care about, a great economics team, a good federal government team. I think a lot of readers have been wondering what’s happened to the editorial page. So those people in the comments, trashing that editorial — what has to be one of the dumbest pieces of writing I’ve read in years — really warmed my soul. Thank you, fellow disenchanted WaPo readers who aren’t gonna give up on the journalists who work there but are absolutely gonna take down the editorial board. I see you, I feel you, I’m one of you. You got me through the week.

ROBIN: Nice. My spiritual sponsor is the new yoga studio I’ve joined. I’ve been doing yoga for 22 years, but this is the first time I’ve actually joined a studio, and I’m in that early puppy-love phase where I’m just like, “When’s the next class?” It has three locations, and I can go to any of them. I’m really enamored of the new yoga studio.

KATHRYN: Awesome.

ROBIN: Eventually there won’t be time in my week to podcast, because I’ll just be doing yoga.

KATHRYN: You can be a full-time yoga person and schedule us as needed.