A new study (commissioned by the city of Seattle) looks at how scheduling works in Seattle businesses and considers what regulations might be in order. Opportunity Washington has a good overview of the findings and responses to them.

Some have questioned the study’s methodology—the authors included. The study consists of surveys of workers and managers, focus groups, and interviews. The authors “concluded that it was logistically impossible to implement a random sampling strategy.” Thus the results may not be representative, and those “who took the time to respond may have more deeply held views than the population at large.”

Because the numbers may be iffy, I won’t dwell on them here. But the paper makes many interesting points, and presumably the city will be considering the study as it attempts to regulate scheduling in Seattle. (See our recent report for more on the issue.)

The study concludes,

Our city is a hard place to earn a living, and an even more difficult place to raise a family. In such an environment, the regulation of worker scheduling may offer some assistance to certain families, but alone it will not make Seattle a livable community for all. What is more, there remains a risk that, for some workers and families, scheduling regulations will exacerbate the true problem by eliminating their preferred strategy for making ends meet.

The study makes the point that “existing labor market regulations distort scheduling.” The example used throughout the paper is the Affordable Care Act provision that requires employers provide health benefits to employees working more than 30 hours a week. The provision gives employers an incentive to keep an employee’s hours below that threshold. More broadly, “Government regulations may lead businesses to alter workers’ schedules in a manner that neither party prefers.” Indeed, as we wrote earlier this year, “when the government mandates specific benefits or working conditions, the optimal mix for a given employee may no longer exist.”

As the scheduling study notes, the theory of compensating differentials

suggests that employers must offer employees higher wages to offset any unattractive element of a job. These might include hazardous working conditions, physical exertion, or an unpredictable work schedule.

As expected, the study “indicates that workers tend to receive higher wages as compensation for accepting risk.”

A few years ago Virginia Postrel wrote about the compensation mix as relates to scheduling. She noted that workers may keep jobs with burdensome schedules because they “prefer more money to predictable hours” or because “employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take lower wages in exchange for better hours” (due to the minimum wage). As we wrote earlier this year, “If one policy is mandated, there will be an opposite reaction in the compensation mix.”

The Seattle study found that “Nearly half of all respondents (49%) would sacrifice even a 20% pay raise in order to maintain one week’s advance notice.” But that means that more than half would prefer the pay raise. Further,

The employee survey reveals no statistically significant relationship between the amount of advance notice provided and reports of significant hardship associated with scheduling. 

So Opportunity Washington may be on to something that the idea of regulating scheduling "increasingly looks like a poor attempt to solve a problem that doesn’t exist." As the study notes,

it should go without saying that actions taken to reduce the cost of living in the Seattle metropolitan area would ease many scheduling-related burdens more effectively than any direct regulation of worker scheduling.