Dignity, Job Quality, and Mobility in the U.S. Service Sector

Abstract

The nature of low-wage work in the United States has fundamentally changed over the past fifty years. These jobs have become increasingly precarious, manifest in stagnant wages, unstable and unpredictable schedules, limited fringe benefits, and lower job security. This is particularly true in the service sector, which now accounts for almost one in five jobs in the U.S. While a robust body of work has examined the causes and consequences of this rising precarity, this dissertation addresses two overarching gaps in the extant literature on precarious work. First, research on precarious work has been mostly siloed from research on dignity at work, so our understanding of the drivers of workplace dignity in the service sector, and its associated consequences, is limited. Second, while scholarship has extensively studied the degree of upward wage mobility from low-wage jobs, less work has considered improvements in job quality more multidimensionally or the labor market contexts and mechanisms that foster such improvement. To address these questions, I draw on novel cross-sectional and longitudinal data from The Shift Project, a web-based survey of service sector workers in the United States that uses advertisements on Facebook and Instagram to target and recruit workers into the sample. I bring together the literatures on dignity, precarious work, and turnover to explore how job conditions that are characteristic of low-wage work in the service sector are associated with workplace dignity, and, in turn, what the consequences of workplace dignity are for employee turnover. Furthermore, I use the case of the “Great Resignation” to study how local labor market conditions shape workers’ probability of transitioning into “good” jobs, defined multidimensionally, as well as how this varies by employment pathway. Chapter 2 explores how service sector workers' unstable and unpredictable schedules are associated with their experiences of dignity in the workplace, manifested in perceptions of respect and fair treatment from their supervisors. I find that schedule instability is strongly and negatively associated with worker dignity, including five just-in-time scheduling practices (experiencing a canceled shift, changed timing to shift, working an on-call shift, working a “clopening” shift (i.e., when a worker both closes one night and opens the following morning after only a few hours of rest) and an index that captures cumulative exposure to schedule instability. Furthermore, I show that the significant relationship between dignity at work and schedule instability is more negative for women than men: while women in low-instability environments report higher dignity at work than men, this inverts at higher levels of instability, where women report lower dignity than men. I posit that the more negative relationship I identify between instability and dignity for women is, in part, driven by work-family conflict. Chapter 3 then examines the consequences of lacking dignity at work, specifically on voluntary employee turnover, a key employee work behavior with notable implications for organizational performance. I find that while experiences of respect and bullying from customers, coworkers, and supervisors are each significantly associated with workers' stated intentions to find a new job, only respect and bullying from supervisors is significantly associated with actual turnover behavior, a gap I argue can be partially explained by the differences in the power and permanence of these social relationships. I also show that supportive coworker relationships actually increase workers' propensity to leave their jobs in low-dignity environments, evidence that social support can empower workers to leave toxic working environments. Chapter 4 explores how workers' job quality changes in tight labor markets, and how this varies by employment pathway (i.e., job staying vs. leaving). This chapter is co-authored with colleagues from the Shift Project (Dylan Nguyen, Daniel Schneider, and Kristen Harknett), and I am lead author. We develop a multidimensional conceptualization of a "good job" that includes a living wage of $15/hour, low schedule instability, and a suite of critical benefits (health insurance, retirement, and paid sick leave). Drawing on longitudinal data that span the period before and during the “Great Resignation,” we find that transitions into such jobs are relatively low, but this varies by local labor market conditions: workers in tight labor markets (e.g., during the Great Resignation) are more likely to transition into good jobs, particularly those who transition out of the service sector.