A Tech Solution to the Minimum Wage Debate

There’s a lot of debate over the minimum wage out there and with good reason. Overwhelmingly, people are recognizing a need to help improve the lives of people with lower earnings, but not everyone is in agreement on what exactly to do about it.

The Minimum Wage Debate: Is It the Whole Picture?

Currently, the national minimum wage in the United States is set at $7.25 an hour. For some time now, there has been a push to increase it. States like Massachusetts have passed higher minimums, and some large cities, such as Seattle and San Francisco, are advocating for $15 minimums to be implemented over several years.

As with most issues, there are a lot of different opinions across the political spectrum. Supporters say it is necessary to combat pay inequality and that it would help grow the economy through increased spending. Critics say such a change would increase the financial burden on employers, causing them to reduce staffing, which could lead to the destruction of jobs.

Looking Beyond Wages: The Scheduling Struggle

However, when focusing on improving the needs of part-time hourly workers, we may want to look beyond just the wages.

I’ve had quite a few jobs in my career where I was paid hourly and where someone was responsible for scheduling my time. I’ve been a packer in a warehouse, a cashier at a grocery store, a waiter, and I’ve worked in customer service. All of these jobs helped me meet some financial needs and were rewarding for the experience gained. Like most part-time workers, I cared a lot about getting a consistent number of hours of work per week. This way, I could ensure that I was making the amount of money I needed. However, very often this didn’t pan out.

The Reality of Unpredictable Shifts

Because my schedule was variable, I would regularly find out my schedule with very little time to coordinate other commitments. Sometimes this meant giving up a shift without the guarantee to pick up another one. Furthermore, there was little consistency from one week to the next; some weeks I would be scheduled for too many hours and others too few.

Since managers typically don’t have time or interest to deal with too many schedule changes, I was typically forced to just deal with it. This lack of proper shift management resulted in totally unpredictable pay.

Apparently, not much has changed in recent years. Speaking recently to a former retail employee, I reconfirmed that it was normal for the store to add and reduce employee shifts unexpectedly. She said, “I would get last-minute requests all the time and often had to turn them down due to other obligations… I lost the hours I needed, and the store was often short-staffed.”

The True Cost of Operational Inefficiencies

Let’s take a look at how this can affect a part-time worker:

If you planned on working 25 hours this week, but somehow due to a scheduling mishap, you lose a shift and end up only working 21 hours—that is more than a 15% drop in income. With no guarantees in place for part-time workers, variable schedules and changing numbers of hours per week can cause severe hardship as they try to meet their financial obligations and family responsibilities.

The frustrating part is that often the reason for fewer hours is due to operational inefficiencies which lead to poor planning and communication. It is not uncommon for an employer to actually need the employee to work more hours, but due to late scheduling (or other scheduling issues), the employee is not able to work, and both sides suffer.

A Win-Win Solution for Frontline Scheduling

For workers and employers experiencing these types of problems with their scheduling, a proper solution may have a much bigger life impact than the proposed changes to the national minimum wage. While anyone will agree that earning more money for the same hours of work is attractive, the introduction of fairer, planned, and consistent schedules will significantly help the quality of life for workers in a way that is equally attractive for their employers.

New approaches to help address these problems are on the way. This is just one piece of WorkJam’s win-win achievements for employees and employers.