Research Projects
Seattle's Secure Scheduling Ordinance
In West Coast Poverty Center, The Evaluation of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance: Year 1 Findings.
The Stable Scheduling Study (at Gap, Inc.).
Stable Scheduling Increases Productivity and Sales: The Stable Scheduling Study.
Research
As employers wrestle with pressures to minimize labor costs, they are increasingly using daily scheduling practices to pass variations in demand onto workers. These growing legions of hourly employees - just-in-time workers - find that their jobs are subject to change season to season, week to week, or even day to day. Understanding how managers are structuring and scheduling jobs is crucial to determining new directions for both social policy and employer practices.
Susan Lambert, Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, is one of the few researchers focusing on the "work" side of work-life issues, primarily studying low-skilled, hourly jobs. Central to her research is examining whether it is possible to create a better model of work for both hourly low-wage employees and employers. This is especially important at a time when employers are shifting risk from the market onto employees, subsequently undermining workers' ability to access social benefits such as health insurance, unemployment insurance, and paid leave.
Biography
Susan J. Lambert is Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, and Director of the Employment Instability, Family Well-Being, and Social Policy Scholars Network (EINet). Lambert received a B.A. summa cum laude in Psychology from Eastern Michigan University, a M.S.W. (Social Program Evaluation) and a Ph.D. in Social Work and Social Science (Organizational Psychology) from the University of Michigan.
Lambert’s research focuses on employer practices and how they shape the quality of hourly jobs, the lives of low-paid workers, and inequality in society. The sites for Lambert’s research span both production and non-production industries, including retail, hospitality, financial services, transportation, and manufacturing, and both publicly-held and family-owned firms. Her research includes comparative organizational case-studies and randomized workplace experiments as well as analyses of national data on the prevalence of precarious scheduling practices in today’s US labor market. Lambert’s current research focuses on the implementation of new municipal-level ordinances regulating employers’ work scheduling practices in several US cities.
Her research is supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth. As a leading researcher on work schedules in hourly jobs, Lambert regularly advises policy organizations, labor groups, employers, and government officials on strategies to improve scheduling practices in ways that balance the needs of employers for labor flexibility with the needs of workers for stable and predictable work hours.
