American Behavioral Scientist

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Place-Bound Jobs at the Intersection of Policy and Management: Comparing Employer Practices in U.S. and Canadian Chain Restaurants Anna Haley-Lock American Behavioral Scientist 2011 55: 823 DOI: 10.1177/0002764211407831 The online version of this article can be found at: http://abs.sagepub.com/content/55/7/823

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Article

Place-Bound Jobs at the Intersection of Policy and Management: Comparing Employer Practices in U.S. and Canadian Chain Restaurants

American Behavioral Scientist 55(7) 823–842 © 2011 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0002764211407831 http://abs.sagepub.com

Anna Haley-Lock1

Abstract Debate about the United States’ minimum wage spiked several years ago at a time when its role in influencing employment conditions had become complicated by firms’ increasing use of job outsourcing and “offshoring.” Yet the latter labor strategies are not obviously applicable to employment revolving around in-person transactions between workers and customers, or “place-bound” work. Such jobs present an opportunity for studying human resource management, and the capacity of public policy to shape it, when policy may be at its most influential over employer practices. The current article considers such a case, investigating how minimum wage rates, other public policies and programs associated with work, and firms’ human resource practices interact in the place-bound position of restaurant waiter. Using new data collected from managers of a sample of 21 sites of two low-end, full-service restaurant chains, the author examined the relationships between management practices for wages and tips, fringe benefits, and staffing and scheduling and the public policy contexts in which they were embedded in suburban Seattle, Chicago, and Vancouver, British Columbia. The author found that employer practices varied by geographic area as a product of contrasts in public regulation of employers as well as supports to workers and families; that employer practices varied between the two chains, independent of geographic location; and that those practices were often poised to have dramatic impacts on waiters’ income and benefits access. The author

1

University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Corresponding Author: Anna Haley-Lock, University of Wisconsin–Madison, School of Social Work, 1350 University Ave., Madison, WI 53706 Email: [email protected]


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concludes by discussing some of the limitations of and prospects for applying public tools to promote the quality of private, hourly jobs. Keywords human resource management, public employment policy, low-wage jobs In the United States, public debate about the legal minimum wage resurfaced several years ago with particular gusto as the federal rate neared a decade at $5.15 (Fox, 2007; National Restaurant Association, 2009; Neumark & Wascher, 2007). Notably however, this latest round of a historic discussion occurred amid new attention to the effects of global competition on U.S. jobs, as American firms increasingly weigh options for outsourcing and “offshoring” work as a means of reducing labor costs. In response to an elevated minimum wage mandate, in other words, businesses may opt to move jobs (Choi, 2006; Kreickemeier & Nelson, 2006; Thomas & Wilkinson, 2006). Yet although such a threat may be fundamentally altering many employer-employee relationships, not all employment is equally vulnerable (Choi, 2006). In segments of the service industry where work requires an in-person transaction between employee and customer, firms wanting a market presence in a given locale have little choice but to engage local regulative constraints. Studying contemporary “place-bound” jobs therefore provides an opportunity to view the interplay between private firms’ human resource strategies and public employment policies when the latter may be at their most influential on firm behavior. In this article, I report findings from a comparative organizational and policy case study in which I considered such an employment case.Taking the place-bound job of waiter as an analytical focus, I examined variation in employers’ human resource management practices for wages and tips, fringe benefits, and staffing and scheduling in a sample of 21 full-service, low-end restaurants affiliated with one of two U.S.-based chains. The research was designed to illuminate variation in governmental regulations and supports for employment as well as private firms’ employment practices across three disparate public policy contexts: suburban cores in the American states of Washington (Seattle) and Illinois (Chicago) and the Canadian province of British Columbia (Vancouver). From analyses of data collected in interviews with site managers, three central findings emerged. First, public regulation of employers and supports for workers varied by state, province, and nation and to such an extent that where a worker lives can substantially dictate the quality of his or her working life more than the contribution of any one employer. Second, employment practices differed between the two chains, independent of geographic location. Finally, restaurants across the sample shaped their workers’ income prospects and benefits access through practices spanning both geography and chain ownership. In the rest of the article, I compare the sampled nations, states, and province as political contexts for employment, focusing on select policy initiatives that regulate employers or support employees and their families. I also review leading accounts for


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variation in employer practices. I then present several patterns among the practices reported by restaurant managers in the study that influence waiters’ income and access to employment benefits. I conclude by discussing some of the limitations and prospects of public tools for assuring job quality and worker and family well-being.

Governmental Approaches to Shaping Employment Conditions Efforts by governments to regulate employers and provide programs to support workers and their families can substantially shape the employment experience in at least two ways: by constraining the behavior of employers who might otherwise provide less hospitable workplace conditions and by providing a set of safety net programs that compensate for what work may not offer. As comparative welfare state scholars have observed, countries and localities within them have historically varied in their strategies for governing and supporting employment (Botero, Djankov, La Porta, Lopes-deSilanes, & Shleifer, 2004; Freeman, 2007; Gornick & Meyers, 2003; Heymann, 2000; Noble, 1997). Comparing the United States and Canada, numerous researchers have characterized the two welfare states as distinctively modest relative to other Western industrialized nations (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Gornick & Meyers, 2003; Noble, 1997). Both countries are viewed as favoring a market-supporting approach that grants employers wide discretion regarding employment arrangements and delivers public services by narrowly defined need rather than universal entitlement. U.S. public policy emphasizes individual responsibility and work ethic, as embodied in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that made employment a central requirement of public aid eligibility. These policy emphases were echoed in Canada’s 1996 Health and Social Transfer block grants to provinces (Breitkreuz, 2005; Brodie, 1997). Yet although the two nations “are as close economically and socially as any pair of countries in the world,” they exhibit “a range of ‘small differences’ in policies, institutions, and economic outcomes” (Card & Freeman, 1993, p. 1). Canadian scholars have described the country as embracing a hybrid welfare state model that pairs a market, individualistic orientation with openness to some varieties of governmental intervention greater than its U.S. neighbor (Block & Roberts, 2000; Breitkreuz, 2005; Lipset, 1990). Zuberi’s (2006) comparative study of hotel jobs in Vancouver and Seattle documented this contrast, revealing numerous differences in the two nations’ initiatives to regulate employers and provide supports to workers and their families. Similarly, in her comparison of the public delivery of health, education, and social services, Bambra (2007) placed the United States and Canada into distinct categories, with Canada joining the ranks of nations—including Denmark and France—that have elsewhere been recognized for their generous welfare state supports (Gornick & Meyers, 2003). The United States and Canada also have divergent regulative protections for labor union organizing and rates of union coverage of workers (Block & Roberts, 2000; Riddell, 1994). As union density in the United States has steadily decreased in recent


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decades, it has remained stable in Canada. In 1970, 24% of U.S. workers and 32% of Canadian workers were union members; by 2007, during data collection for this study, those rates were 12% and 30%, respectively (Human Resources and Social Development Canada, 2008b; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008b; Visser, 2006). Differences can also be observed among the states and provinces included in the current study. In a ranking of U.S. and Canadian states and provincial labor standards, Block and Roberts (2000) classified British Columbia and Quebec as having Canada’s most labor-supportive regulations in place. In the United States, they ranked Washington 4th but Illinois 27th for union organizing protections (Block & Roberts, 2000). Paralleling these assessments, 21% of Washington workers but just 15% in Illinois in 2007 were represented by union-bargained employment agreements (Schmitt, 2008; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008a; Visser, 2006). Moreover, Washington is one of only six states to have maintained a level of 20% or higher of union-represented employment during the period from 2003 to 2007 (Schmitt, 2008; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2008a). British Columbia, by contrast, had a union density of 31% in 2007, a level that in spite of its labor-friendly climate represented only the fifth highest among the provinces (Quebec was in third place at 36%; Statistics Canada, 2007).

Minimum Wage Laws Minimum wage regulation represents one public tool for shaping private employment conditions. Laws establishing wage floors vary strikingly across American states and Canadian provinces, and along two dimensions that make them particularly useful for investigating the interplay between public policy and private firms’ human resource practices for waitstaff jobs: the basic rate and the rate applied to workers receiving tips.1 In the United States, contemporary minimum wage laws originate from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the current federal hourly level of $7.25 as of July 2009 (Shaefer, 2006; U.S. Department of Labor, 2011b). Responding over time to concerns that the federal level was too low, 17 states and the District of Columbia have adopted higher minimums that as of 2011 range from $7.35 in Arizona and Montana to $8.67 in Washington State ($7.93 during data collection for this study). Illinois’ minimum wage is currently $8.25 ($7.50 at data collection). Just 9 states, including Washington but not Illinois, automatically adjust their minimum wage annually to reflect changes in cost of living. State mandates for minimum wages also differ in their allowance of “tip credits,” which establish a subminimum wage for workers who, like waiters, receive customer gratuities. In the 43 states with tip credit policies, including Illinois but not Washington, minimum wages for restaurant workers range from $2.13 in 13 states to $7.00 in Hawaii (U.S. Department of Labor, 2011a). Washington is one of just 7 states that require employers to pay a universal minimum wage to all workers. In contrast, Illinois permits employers to pay waitstaff just $4.95 per hour ($4.50 during data collection), with the expectation that the combination of wages and tips exceeds the minimum wage by 50 cents per hour (U.S. Department of Labor, 2011a).


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In Canada, minimum wage regulation is left to provinces following the 1996 repeal of a federal law (CBC News, 2009). In 2011, levels range from CDN $8.75 in British Columbia to CDN $11.00 in Nunavut (Canadian Department of Labour, 2011). Notably, at the time of this study’s data collection the British Columbia rate of $8.00 represented the second highest in Canada, and no tip credit existed. The province recently introduced an $8.50 alternate wage for tipped workers, however, joining Ontario (which allows a reduction in the base wage of employees who serve liquor from CDN$10.25 to CDN$8.90) and Quebec (employees receiving gratuities earn CDN$8.35 instead of CDN$9.65; Restaurant Central.ca, 2011). One province, Yukon, adjusts its minimum wage annually with cost-of-living changes (Battle, 2011). Unlike in any state in the United States, British Columbia’s minimum wage law offers workers additional income protection in the form of guaranteed minimum daily pay. Employers are required to pay employees who have been scheduled to work up to 4 hours for a minimum of 2 hours, even if the employer opts to send them home early from a shift (for example, because of slow business); individuals scheduled for more than 8 hours must be paid for at least 4 hours of work (British Columbia Ministry of Labour, Citizens’ Services and Open Government, 2011).

Work Leave and Health Insurance British Columbia and Canada have adopted several additional employment regulations and social safety net supports that distinguish them from the United States, Washington State, and Illinois as policy contexts for work (White, 2006). The province mandates firms to provide 2 weeks of vacation to their workers after 12 months as well as vacation pay at the rate of 4% of annual wages; these amounts rise to 3 weeks and 6% of wages after 5 years of employment. British Columbia also requires employers to pay workers for nine “statutory holidays” per year at regular wages if not scheduled to work and between 1.5 and 2.0 times their wage rates if they do work. Employees in British Columbia also have access to 5 additional days of unpaid “family responsibility leave” annually and up to 37 weeks of unpaid parenting leave for the care of a child (British Columbia Ministry of Labour, Citizens’ Services and Open Government, 2011). From the Canadian federal government, an individual who has worked for an employer for at least 600 hours in the prior 52 weeks (or since the last claim) is entitled to receive 15 weeks of maternity and sickness leave and 35 weeks of parental leave, reimbursed at up to 55% of wages (Service Canada, 2011; White, 2006).2 In the United States, no comparable short- or longer-term leave is guaranteed through the federal or state level. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) introduced job-protected but unpaid leave for individuals to cover dependent care responsibilities or personal illness. The law provides up to 12 weeks for individuals who have worked a minimum of 1,250 hr in the 12 months preceding the leave request and at firms with staffs of 50 or more; it is estimated that roughly 40% of American workers are


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ineligible (Ray, Gornick, & Schmitt, 2008). Several U.S. states have recently adopted paid extended leave for workers, including Washington State in 2007. Its paid family insurance legislation provides a 5-week parent “bonding” period with infants that would pay a flat amount of $250 per week; however, the state legislature has deferred implementation to 2012 and has not yet identified a funding source (Washington State Legislature, 2009). There is no U.S. federal or state regulation to require employers to provide short-term vacation or holidays off of work, paid or not. Finally, the countries’ approaches to health insurance also diverge. The Canadian government provides oversight to health insurance plans organized and implemented by each province. In British Columbia at the time of data collection, the Medical Services Plan cost a family of three or more CDN$108 monthly. In the United States, in contrast, health insurance for all but the poorest citizens remains a private benefit associated with employment, although diminishingly so: From 2000 to 2006, just prior to data collection for the study, the proportion of American workers with employerprovided health insurance dropped from 51% to 48% (Bernstein & Shierholz, 2008). For a family of four in 2008, the cost of an employer-provided health insurance plan averaged $12,700 annually, of which employees paid roughly $3,400—up 12% from the year before (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2008).

Accounting for Variation in Employer Practices Firms’ employment practices emerge within the political and policy contexts described above while also reflecting strategic business decisions. Neoinstitutional scholars offer one interpretation of the effects of external conditions, such as minimum wage regulation, on firm behavior. They describe these outside forces as creating “legitimacy imperatives” requiring organizations to adhere to—or at minimum, to outwardly appear to heed— prevailing norms and rules (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Scott, 1995). To the extent that organizations encounter variable outside factors, their approaches to job design, compensation, and employee management should also differ. Yet firms facing comparable environmental conditions—that is, those operating in the same industry, labor market, or both—may also vary in their employee compensation and management practices (Hunter, 2000; Klass, 1999; Lambert & Haley-Lock, 2004). Seeking a source of competitive advantage, some businesses strive to be “cost leaders” that provide goods or services at lower prices than competitors, whereas others instead adopt a strategy of differentiating on production quality (Arthur, 1999). These strategies in turn translate into distinct human resource templates. Firms aiming for low cost are likely to make minimal human resource investments relative to their quality-focused peers, for which providing generous employment supports that attract and keep workers is deemed critical to company performance (Pfeffer, 2005; Wright, Dunford, & Snell, 2001). Among even cost-minimizing firms, however—lower-end chain restaurants largely fall into this category—employment practices can diverge between those embracing shorter- versus longer-term orientations toward managing labor expenses (Lambert,


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2008). Employers focused on the short term are primarily concerned with payroll, which in the case of lower-level hourly employees centers on wage levels and the number of work hours. When adopting a longer-term orientation, firms also consider labor costs imposed by voluntary employee turnover in the forms of replacement candidate recruitment, hiring and training, and lost productivity. By making strategic human resource investments, they seek to minimize these expenses (Huselid, 1995; Tsui, Pearce, Porter, & Tripoli, 1997; Williamson, 1979).

Anticipating Restaurant Response to a Minimum Wage Waitstaff positions are typically paid the legal minimum wage, making this one employment regulation central in defining employer labor costs and, in turn, waitstaff working conditions (Azar, 2003). In response to minimum wage mandates, restaurants may theoretically seek to lessen payroll costs by employing fewer workers, reducing the hours or compensation benefits of current workers, or some combination of these. The reduced staffing effect has been the central focus of past minimum wage research, although the evidence is mixed. Card and Krueger (1994) found that a minimum wage increase in New Jersey was associated with employment growth, whereas Neumark and Wascher’s (1995) replication of the Card and Krueger study, incorporating new payroll data, showed a slight decline in jobs after a minimum wage rose. Singell and Terborg (2007) also found that increases in Oregon’s and Washington State’s minimum wages in the late 1990s and early 2000s resulted in reduced employment growth in the eating and drinking industries but not in industries where base pay is typically higher than the local minimum wage. More rarely studied, restaurants may also conserve on labor costs by reducing their current waiters’ benefits, including health insurance and pension access. In their analysis of 1987 to 2000 Current Population Survey data, however, Simon and Kaestner (2004) observed no significant effects of minimum wage levels on availability of these benefits to low-skill, low-wage workers. Decreasing work hours as a means to control labor costs does not appear to have been studied in restaurant settings (Golden, 2001; Lambert, 2008). Employers across the full-service restaurant industry commonly follow a “tip-out” convention for tipped employees that also helps them manage total payroll expenses. According to such rules, waiters are required to share some portion of their gratuities with nontipped “back-of-the-house” staff (Azar, 2003). This practice diminishes the take-home income of waiters to varying extents across restaurants while effectively cross-subsidizing employers’ payroll costs for nontipped staff. That is, employers may capitalize on the tip-out convention to enable them to pay a somewhat lower wage than they might otherwise to holders of such jobs as dishwasher, cook, and busser. Establishments encountering relatively high mandated minimum wages might thus be expected to impose greater tip-out expectations to offset labor costs for waiters. The market segment in which a restaurant positions itself may provide clues about its likely response to minimum wage conditions. Two such segments, casual and family dining, dominate the lower end of the industry that was the focus of the current


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study (Gale, 2007; Nelson, 2001). Casual establishments have typically distinguished themselves, albeit to a modest degree, on customer service and ambience and might therefore be expected to invest in personnel deemed able to deliver these. Cutting staff, staff hours, and benefits as well as imposing high tip credit expectations may all have negative effects on service quality and therefore be less tenable strategies for more quality-oriented restaurants. In contrast, family establishments have tended to place a greater emphasis on affordability and thus aim to keep expenses—for labor and, in turn, meals—low. Recent environmental conditions may be loosening the link between segment positioning and employee management approach, however. The rise in gas prices at the time of data collection followed by a weakening North American economy have led customers to scale back their dining-out habits. In the escalating competition, casual restaurants have fared somewhat better than their family counterparts, propelling some of the latter to adopt more service-oriented elements (Olson, 2007; Prewitt, 2007). At the same time, growing family time pressures have also propelled restaurants in both segments to introduce new quick service options that may minimize focus on the quality of the waiter-customer interaction (Gale, 2007; Olson, 2007; Prewitt, 2007).

Method I designed the current research as a comparative organizational and policy case study, drawing on approaches from Yin (1994) and Ragin (1987, 2003) as well as additional analytical techniques from Weber (1990) and Miles and Huberman (1994). Ragin (2003) describes comparative case study research as efforts using relatively limited sample sizes “to construct empirically grounded, theoretically relevant typologies of cases” (p. 11); Yin notes that case studies are well suited to investigating “how” and “why” questions, as in the present study’s examination of how public policy and private management practices interact within restaurants.

Suburb and Chain Sampling Strategy My strategy for sampling suburbs and restaurant sites was designed to incorporate variation in federal, state, and provincial public policy contexts as well as restaurant chain business strategies while minimizing differences in economic and labor market conditions. Focusing on chains helped reduce potential bias from cross-site differences in non-employment-related restaurant operations by assuring that such details as menus, uniforms, site plans, and furniture were nearly constant within each chain. Because the current research was part of a larger study of restaurant employment that also examined work conditions within restaurants in urban and rural Washington State, I constructed an organizational sampling frame that included chains with locations in those urban and rural areas as well as suburban Seattle, Chicago, and Vancouver as of summer 2007. A review of a Washington State Department of Labor and Industries database on active full-service restaurants showed that only three


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chains met this criterion. I excluded a seafood chain because of concern that it attracts different customer bases in coastal Seattle and Vancouver suburbs than in midwestern Chicago, and a corporate executive at a second chain declined to have restaurants participate. I selected the third chain, which I have assigned the pseudonym “Community Spot,” for study recruitment along with “Breakfast Place,” a chain with locations in all but the rural area. Both chains have locations throughout the world, Community Spot with approximately 2,000 restaurants in 20 countries during the data collection period and Breakfast Place with more than 1,300 in fewer than five countries.3 With this pair, the sample includes one chain from each of the two segments of the low-end, full-service restaurant market, casual (Community Spot) and family (Breakfast Place); this feature of the study’s sampling strategy was intended to introduce variation in business strategy. Community Spots are not open for breakfast, have busy customer traffic for lunch and dinner meals, and as with most other causal segment establishments, offer full bar service. In contrast, Breakfast Place sites feature a heavy focus on breakfast, although they do a rush of business during many late-night, “graveyard” shifts. The Breakfast Place menu offers a lower price point than Community Spot’s; combined with the absence of bar service, total bills at Breakfast Place may on average be somewhat lower than at Community Spots, and total earned tips thus also lower, as a result. I recruited the restaurants, all individually owned franchises, at the local level rather than through corporate-level inquiry. For recruitment in the United States, I identified four sites of each in suburban Seattle and Chicago by prioritizing suburbs that had at least one location of each chain; doing so permitted me to control for local industry, labor market, and other economic differences. Sites of the two chains were in fact often located close to each other, in some cases, within the same indoor or strip mall. When one chain did not have a presence or declined to participate in a given suburb, I identified alternate sites in the nearest suburbs with comparable economic and resident demographic characteristics as indicated by the 2000 Census and selected a site randomly from those. Using this approach, I was able to enlist locations of both chains in three of the same Seattle suburbs and two of the same Chicago suburbs. Managers from one Seattle Community Spot and one Chicago Breakfast Place declined to participate; interviews could not be scheduled with one other Seattle Community Spot and Chicago Breakfast Place because of scheduling limitations of the research team. In the Vancouver area, a total of six sites were in operation at the time of data collection, including three Breakfast Places and two Community Spots, in two suburbs; five agreed to participate.

Data Collection Instrument and Procedure I developed a semistructured protocol for interviews with site managers, drawing numerous items from previous research (Bond, Thompson, Galinsky, & Prottas, 2002; Haley-Lock, 2003; Kalleberg, Knoke, Marsden, & Spaeth, 1996; Lambert & HaleyLock, 2004). Interviews with U.S. managers were conducted in summer 2007 and


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with Vancouver managers in February 2008; all were completed in person and at the restaurants. A mix of open- and closed-ended questions asked about three categories of employment practices: wages and tips, fringe benefits, and staffing (including proportions of part- and full-time positions and staffing during busy and slow shifts) and scheduling (e.g., extent of employee input on work hours and days and frequency of schedule changes). Managers were also asked about their approaches to employee hiring, workforce and restaurant characteristics, and their employment experience in the industry, state, or province and at their current location.

Employer Practices Shaping Waiter Income Even with a governmentally mandated minimum wage in place, employers could affect waiters’ take-home pay in several ways. Tip-Outs. The 21 sites in this study were no exception to the widespread full-service restaurant industry practice of imposing tip-out rules on waiters. All of the managers reported that tip sharing in some proportion to total shift sales was expected from waiters after each work shift. This convention diminishes the take-home income of waiters to varying extents across restaurants. At Community Spot sites, larger meal bills—the combined result of slightly higher entrée pricing and alcohol sales—may account for the somewhat higher hourly tips reported by managers. Waiters at that chain consequently paid more in absolute tipped-out dollars than their Breakfast Place counterparts but also presumably took more home. I observed what appeared to be a positive relationship between minimum wage and tip-out levels in the Vancouver locations, which faced what for Canada at the time was a relatively high minimum wage rate. Tip-out requirements there were the most imposing of the study, ranging from 2% to 3.5% percent of a waiter’s shift sales. Washington State sites had lower tip-out levels than those in Chicago, however, particularly in the Community Spot chain—notable, again, given the somewhat higher levels of tips earned there on average. The median tip-out expectation in suburban Seattle was 1.25% of shift sales, where the minimum wage at the time of data collection was and remains the nation’s highest. Tip-outs there were just half of the median tip-out of 2.5% in Chicago restaurants, where waiters were paid just $4.50 per hour. Staffing. Employers also shaped employee earnings through their practices for allocating work hours. Part-time versus full-time. Sites differed in their use of part-time positions, ranging from just 29% of waitstaff at a Seattle Community Spot restaurant to 100% at a Seattle Breakfast Place. Yet of the two chains, Breakfast Place made generally greater use of full-time waiters, with a median of 50% compared to just 28.5% at Community Spot. Across the suburban cores, Seattle and Vancouver managers in the study reported using more full-time waiters as well, with medians of 45% and 50% in contrast to 28.5% in Chicago. Multiple managers explained that having part-time employees on staff helped them cover scheduling needs, given that many waiters were potentially


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available to call in to work, many of whom had relatively low expectations for total weekly hours. Staffing levels. Employers also differed in the levels of waitstaff they scheduled per shift, a practice closely linked to the total numbers of waiters they kept on the payroll. There appeared to be chain and geographic patterns for both of these practices, as well. At all Breakfast Place sites and sites of both chains in suburban Vancouver, median waitstaffs were the smallest of the sample: headcounts were 14 and 16 respectively, compared to 22 to 33 at Community Spot and Seattle and Washington sites. Breakfast Place and Vancouver restaurants also exhibited higher median proportions of waiters scheduled during busy shifts, at 53% and 47% versus roughly one third of waitstaff, respectively. (Staffing levels during slow shifts appeared more similar among sites.) Hiring fewer waiters can translate into greater waiter income by enabling the total available work hours to be divided across fewer individuals, thus expanding both employer-paid wages and tip earnings. Scheduling more waiters per shift has complex impacts, however: It lightens the workload for individual workers and may therefore enhance service quality but reduces the amount of tips each waiter can earn. Numerous managers also acknowledged that they often sent scheduled waiters home, or called them to tell them not to come in, when business was unexpectedly slow. Notably, this practice was less commonly reported in Vancouver, where the British Columbia minimum daily pay law limits employers’ freedom to engage in “just-in-time” staffing adjustments without incurring financial cost (Lambert, 2008). Scheduling input and changes. Waiters’ ability to work and thus realize the income potential of the hours offered by employers rests on restaurants’ practices related to making changes to and accepting employee input in scheduling. When hours are not what workers need to accommodate both jobs and family obligations, or are unpredictable because of last-minute scheduling changes, workers may face difficulties coming in. Managers differed in how frequently they made changes to waiters’ posted work schedules, with Breakfast Place locations across the suburban cores as well as Chicago sites of both chains generating somewhat fewer changes than their sample counterparts. Waiters’ level of input into their work days and hours was more comparable across chains and suburban cores, but not without implications for work-life balance. Managers generally agreed that they allowed “a lot” of waiter say into days worked but “very little or none” into hours of the day, as shifts were typically set around traditional mealtimes. Broader waiter input into work hours was accepted at several Breakfast Place locations in Seattle and Chicago. Day and hour assignments in restaurant waitstaff work are influential on income, given variation in customer traffic by day and time of day, something all managers noted. For example, employees who work primarily the busier weekend shifts often earn more in average tips per hour then those scheduled for slower weekdays. Restaurant employers’ conventions for assigning scheduled waiters to specific tables and sections of the dining area, typically based on a combination of employee seniority and perceived performance, represented an important final influence on worker income. Many managers noted that certain parts of the restaurant were


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consistently more popular with customers than others and thus reliably generated more traffic. As a result, take-home incomes could differ between two waiters, net of performance, during the same shift.

Employer Practices Shaping Waiter Benefits Access The distinct approaches that Canada and the United States take to both regulating private employment practices and providing individual and family supports for employment, reviewed earlier, contribute to dramatic contrasts in the working conditions experienced by waiters north and south of the border. Through the Canadian and British Columbia governments, waiters at the suburban Vancouver sites received individual and family health insurance, paid vacation and statutory holidays, and wagereimbursed extended leave for parenting and sickness. Absent public provisions other than unpaid FMLA leave, the American waiters’ access to these supports was relatively minimal. Seven of the eight Community Spot restaurants sampled in the United States and just one Seattle-area Breakfast Place location extended paid vacation to workers, and no holiday time off was provided at the American sites with or without pay. All eight U.S. Community Spot restaurants made a health insurance plan available to employees, although only six also included a dependent care option. None of the U.S. Breakfast Place sites offered a health insurance plan. None of the restaurants studied in either country provided sick days, paid or not, to any employees. The American Community Spot employers that did offer fringe benefits limited their access by waiters and other employees in at least three ways. Part-time staff was always ineligible for health insurance. Community Spot’s fairly heavy use of part-time waiters, ranging in the United States from 29% to 90%, excluded a substantial portion of waitstaff from coverage. Furthermore, several managers noted that high out-ofpocket health care costs incurred by the restaurant-provided plan discouraged most eligible waiters from taking up the benefit. These combined barriers to access rendered health insurance at Community Spot restaurants largely a symbolic offering. Among the U.S. sites extending paid vacation, finally, 1 week was provided to waiters after 1 year of employment. Because the median length of waiter tenure at the Washington State and Illinois sites was 13.5 and 12 months, respectively, many did not hold the job long enough to use this benefit.

Discussion The foregoing findings reveal considerable variation in the conditions of waitstaff work across sites of two large chains in the lower end of the restaurant industry and across geographic areas reflecting different public policy contexts for employment. Benefits that in the United States are traditionally associated with workplaces, such as health insurance and paid vacation, were offered by primarily one chain, Community Spot. At the Canadian sites, by contrast, those supports were governmentally assured. Restaurants


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from the same chain and those located in the same suburban core, furthermore, also exhibited variation in employer practices related to waiter staffing and scheduling. The employer practices reported by managers also suggest some limitations of current public employment regulation for influencing working conditions in these restaurant settings. Focusing on the case of minimum wage laws, I found that restaurant employers could significantly shape their waiters’ take-home incomes through tip-out rules as well as scheduling and staffing procedures. The effect of the former was slightly less onerous for Community Spot waiters, who on average earned somewhat higher absolute tip amounts and who, at least in the United States, faced lower tip-out requirements. Yet the qualifier on average eclipses the significant impact that employer staffing and scheduling procedures may have on waiter income. Using part-time versus full-time waiters, limiting waiter input into work days and hours, frequently changing posted schedules, and assigning sections on the basis of seniority or perceived performance were all likely to inject variation into a given worker’s schedule over time as well as among comparable workers during the same shift. Furthermore, the employment benefits that were provided at employers’ discretion— in this sample, among only the U.S. chains and primarily Community Spot—often were not functionally accessible to employees. Rather, restaurant-imposed rules about fulltime status as well as high out-of-pocket costs (health insurance) and extended waiting periods (paid vacation) put those compensation items out of reach for many waiters. By contrast, these employment benefits were identical across Canadian sites of the two chains as a result of Canada’s and British Columbia’s more expansive approach to employment regulation and support. Although paid vacation in British Columbia required a year-long wait for initial access, the public provision of health insurance insulated that program from the vagaries of private employment. The current study is limited, because of resource constraints, by not having data from waiters on the specific employment conditions they experience. As a result, I cannot generate insights about the specific impacts of those conditions on their work and personal lives. It is possible, for example, that within as well as across restaurants, wages and benefits are accessed differently on the basis of waiter gender, race, and other demographic attributes (see Haley-Lock & Ewert, 2011, for an aggregated approach to such analyses by gender and caregiver status). The findings do suggest more basically that waiters occupy different planes of opportunity within the same and across comparable restaurants, a finding that parallels other recent scholarship on lower-wage, hourly jobs. The study also relies on a sample drawn from just two chains as well as chains that are positioned in different segments of the restaurant market. Although this sample characteristic makes the cross-chain variation in employer practices somewhat less surprising, given established human resource management research, it does not explain the within-chain variation observed across as well as within suburban cores; it should be emphasized, furthermore, that both chains occupy the low end of the market and draw from the same labor force.


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Conclusion Variation in managers’ reported employment practices reveals how business risk is transferred down even to lower-level, hourly employees who face comparatively limited vulnerability from job outsourcing or offshoring by firms (Hacker, 2006; Lambert, 2008). That is, even when public policy to regulate employment conditions should be at its most robust in influencing firm behavior, both chains in this study could mitigate labor cost impacts of minimum wage mandates through a range of strategies shaping waiters’ income and access to benefits. This “loose coupling” of policy and management highlights the necessity of crafting public employment laws that respond to specific industry, organizational, and occupational structures within employing firms (Edelman, 1990; Edelman & Suchman, 1997). This need is expanding in an increasingly globally competitive economy in which distinct classes of work exist, and are regulated, side by side. American call center jobs can often be readily sent abroad; in contrast, many distribution center jobs in U.S. companies must remain on American soil for logistics reasons. Yet the latter may still be flexibly located within certain regions, and thus permit firms to optimize local economic and political hospitality. Waiter positions—along with grocery cashiers and retail stock clerks, among other examples—belong to a uniquely immobile category, however, because they must stay wherever firms seek a market presence. This constraint presents an opportunity for creating “sticky” public regulation for at least one class of jobs, but one unfulfilled unless regulative efforts are tailored to the front-line conditions of employment that those jobholders face. Based on this study’s findings, the case of waiter employment suggests the need for a regulative approach that accounts for the often highly unstable work hours that hourly employees must navigate to achieve their desired income and benefits. The Vancouver sites, and the national and provincial public policy contexts in which they are embedded, provide several insights for strengthening the capacity of U.S. employment policy to enhance conditions of work. There, a minimum daily pay law on top of a mandated hourly wage corresponded with fewer managers who reported that they sent home scheduled staff when business was unexpectedly slow. In potentially discouraging just-in-time staffing adjustments, this regulation may stabilize workers’ incomes while supporting their ability to schedule dependent care around work hours. The absence at the time of the study of a tip credit in British Columbia, as in Washington State still, avoided the imposition of a standard deduction on worker pay based on assumed access to an alternate source of income, tips, that is in fact highly variable. Regulations curbing employers’ discretion in setting and changing employee work schedules would also go a long way to reducing instability in waitstaff employment. Initiatives of this type might include laws to guarantee minimum work hours after hire, minimum advance notice to workers of their schedules, and minimum-daily-pay-type mechanisms. Public programs would likely still be necessary to absorb some of the unavoidable residual financial risk to workers of firm scheduling practices. Accordingly, U.S. unemployment insurance and public welfare eligibility rules should be adjusted to account for employer- driven fluctuations in work hours.


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Some initiatives have cross-industry, cross-labor-category applications. Public provision of health care that is fully external to employment, as found throughout Canada, eliminates the loss of benefit eligibility that may come from working irregular hours; it may also reduce if not remove one incentive U.S. employers have in the employerprovided insurance system for using part-time employees versus full-time, benefitseligible ones. Paid extended leave for parenting and personal and family illness, also observed in Canada and British Columbia, lessens the financial and logistical burdens of combining job and family responsibilities for lower-wage workers. A general lesson to emerge from this study is that substantial reliance on firm discretion to secure a minimum floor of job quality (and workers’ personal and family well-being in turn) can result in very modest benefits for workers and large inequalities in benefits across, and sometimes even within, work settings. At the same time, public policy tools that are blunt instruments, lacking industry- and job-specific features, can be readily manipulated by employers seeking to control costs of jobs they cannot feasibly move to cheaper labor markets. The latter constraint may offer the best prospect for developing public employment initiatives that, when honed to the industry and organizational realities of contemporary work, begin to better balance risk and reward between employer and employee. Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Stephanie Ewert and Danielle Fumia for their assistance with this research. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual research meeting of the Association for Public Policy and Management, Los Angeles, November 7.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: The author expresses her appreciation to the West Coast Poverty Center Emerging Scholars program and Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, both based at the University of Washington, for their funding of this research.

Notes 1. Legal minimum wages additionally vary across some states by employee age, occupation, industry and firm size (CBC News, 2009; U.S. Department of Labor, 2009b). 2. As Gornick and Meyers (2003) and others have noted, family leave benefits in European and particularly in the Scandinavian countries are more generous in time and financial support than those provided in Canada. 3. These data are rounded to preserve the confidentiality of the restaurants.


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Bio Anna Haley-Lock is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is affiliated with the Institute for Research on Poverty and Center on Wisconsin Strategy. Her research uses an organizational lens to examine firm practices for compensating and managing lower-skill and lower-wage jobs and the implications of such practices on organizational performance and employee work-life fit.
