The “Mock Calendar” and the Disposable Worker

Unstable work schedules produce significant precarity for low-wage workers. Beyond earning low hourly wages, many cannot predict how many hours of work they will be scheduled each week, or when those hours will fall—making it difficult to work multiple jobs to increase their income. Brian Halpin’s ethnography of a California catering company shows how managers treated workers as disposable not by firing them, but by manipulating their hours.

Halpin observed participants at “California Catering,” an upscale Northern California catering company. Workers were overwhelmingly undocumented people from Mexico, which contributed to their vulnerability in the labor market.

As a white employee, Halpin was “often put in a pseudo-managerial position,” which gave him access to management discussions about scheduling. The skilled nature of upscale food preparation meant that managers wanted to keep workers available by giving them enough shifts to prevent them from moving on to other jobs. At the same time, they sought to keep labor costs as low as possible, cutting workers from the calendar at the last minute and even sending them home mid-shift.

“These workers are not disposable in the sense that they are fired,” Halpin writes. Rather, “they are disposable in that management dismisses them from the schedule only to resurrect them again when needed, a practice that seriously constrains and disadvantages workers.”

Managers would even sign workers out when they were at off-site events, after transporting them in company vehicles. Workers would then remain stuck at the jobsite without pay for the remainder of the event—and during that time, a manager might still direct them to work, despite being off the clock and unpaid. Workers complied in the belief that if they did not, they would lose scheduled work hours in the weeks to come.

At the same time, by ensuring that even the most contingent worker had at least one shift every week or two, managers kept them available should they be needed. That shift might be taken from a more permanent employee, whose schedule would be cut from four shifts a week to three.

Managers used what Halpin calls a “mock calendar” to keep workers invested in the belief that they would get enough hours. The mock calendar regularly showed more workers scheduled for more hours than management planned to use.

According to Halpin, “Management accomplishes two things by over scheduling. First, workers get the impression that there will be sufficient work, thereby preventing them from scheduling themselves at other jobs or making plans on the scheduled workdays. Second, if management decides that they do need the worker, they have the option of keeping them on the schedule.”

These practices, of course, show disregard for workers’ ability to find paid work elsewhere—or simply to conduct their own lives. Managers valued workers’ skill, but only enough to maintain access to it. As is so often the case in the U.S. labor market, schedule “flexibility” worked to the benefit of managers, not workers.

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