Competing for hours: unstable work schedules and underemployment among hourly workers in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between schedule instability and underemployment among hourly employees. The value to employers of specific hours of work often varies over short intervals, motivating variable scheduling and incomplete contracts that do not specify hours or availability. When employers offer variable weekly total hours, competition for scarce hours motivates employees to be available for work over a broader range of times. Workers may consequently be rewarded with more hours, but they garner fewer hours than their counterparts with stable hours. Cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey demonstrates that underemployment is significantly more likely among hourly workers on unstable schedules. Longitudinal analysis indicates that even among the initially underemployed, who are strongly motivated to increase their availability, switching into an unstable schedule results in significantly fewer hours, providing evidence of employer-driven constraints on hours. There is no evidence of compensating differentials for unstable schedules.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".