How Three Cities Protected Workers: Living Wages, Predictable Scheduling, and Paid Sick Leave

The Job Quality Challenge

What makes for a good job? Over the past forty years, job quality has decreased for most Americans. The majority of workers over this time period have seen stagnating or declining wages relative to rising cost of living, diminished benefits, and decreasing employment stability. Today, only 40% of Americans say they have “good jobs.”

It’s no surprise, then, that local leaders find themselves under increasing pressure to improve the quality of jobs in their communities. Amidst competing priorities, what would it look like to implement an evidence-based, local agenda to improve job quality?

An evidence-informed set of strategies could focus on providing workers with a living wage, guaranteeing paid sick leave, and ensuring predictable work schedules. Each of these strategies is backed by strong evidence of improving outcomes for workers with little to no negative impact on local job growth or business relocation.

Providing a Living Wage

An evidence-based agenda to improve job quality should begin with providing workers with a living wage. A living wage is what a worker must earn to sufficiently cover their basic needs, without relying on public assistance. Since the cost of housing, transportation, healthcare, and other essentials varies by location, what constitutes a living wage differs from place to place. But even in the lowest-cost areas of the country, a living wage is approximately $17 per hour, well above the minimum wage in most communities.

Research demonstrates that living wage laws benefit both workers and employers–they increase earnings for employees, boost worker productivity, and decrease staff turnover. Despite this evidence, the national minimum wage is only $7.25 per hour, and 20 states have not raised their minimum wage beyond the federal floor. Many states actively preempt local governments from raising minimum wages above the state standard. But in states where local governments can raise wages, over 50 cities and counties have done so since 2003.

In Flagstaff (AZ), local leaders successfully passed a living wage law by ballot measure in 2016. A coalition of elected officials, national labor organizations, and local student and hospitality groups designed and advocated for the measure, which raised the city’s minimum wage gradually, from $8.05 to $15.50 an hour between 2016 and 2022. Since 2022, the minimum wage has been adjusted annually to reflect changes in the cost-of-living. The lower minimum wage for tipped workers will also be phased out by 2026 – a win for hospitality workers, who make up about 15 percent of the city’s workforce.

Today, Flagstaff’s minimum wage stands at $17.40 per hour, more than double the rate when the ballot measure first passed in 2016. Over that period, the rate of poverty in Flagstaff declined by close to 7 percent. At the same time, there is little evidence that the living wage measure negatively impacted area businesses – total restaurant employment, for instance, increased.

Guaranteeing Paid Sick Leave

In addition to adopting a living wage, local leaders should seek to ensure paid sick leave. Paid sick leave guarantees that workers are able to take days off while they or their loved ones are sick without having to forego wages or risk their job security.

Research shows that paid sick leave benefits workers, employers, and communities alike. When in place, these provisions are associated with better individual and community health outcomes, lower healthcare costs, higher worker productivity, and reduced employee turnover.

Unfortunately, access to paid sick leave varies considerably across occupations, with low-income, service sector, and part-time workers being the least likely to have paid sick days. Nationally, there is no federal right to paid sick leave, and only 14 states and Washington, D.C. have guaranteed it for all workers. Amid slow progress at the state and federal levels, over 20 cities and counties have enacted paid sick leave statutes.

In 2015, Pittsburgh (PA) passed the Paid Sick Days Act, a product of close collaboration between members of City Council, the administration of then-Mayor Bill Peduto, the business community, and local advocacy organizations. The law requires all employers to provide workers with at least one hour of paid sick leave for every 35 hours worked. Employees of businesses with more than 15 workers are able to earn 40 hours of paid leave; employees of smaller businesses are able to earn 24. To ensure compliance with the new law, the city’s Office of Equity launched a robust public engagement campaign and developed a complaint intake and investigation process.

Before the Paid Sick Days Act went into effect, about 40 percent of private sector workers in Pittsburgh had no paid sick leave. Once enacted, more than 200,000 workers gained access to paid sick leave in the city’s service sector alone.

Ensuring Predictable Schedules

Alongside living wages and paid sick leave, local leaders are increasingly adding fair workweek reforms to their job quality agendas. These policies require employers to provide workers with predictable schedules, usually notifying workers of their schedules two weeks in advance. When employers fail to do so, they are typically required to pay workers additional compensation.

Without predictable schedules, many part-time and service sector workers have little control over their time. This makes planning nearly impossible, whether that means arranging for childcare, seeing the doctor, or pursuing higher education. Research links erratic work schedules to higher psychological distress, worse sleep quality, and greater unhappiness. Unfortunately, there are no federal or state laws ensuring predictable schedules, but several local jurisdictions have passed their own fair workweek laws.

In 2017, New York City (NY) passed one of the nation’s first fair workweek laws. The law requires fast food restaurants – where schedule instability is often the highest – to provide their workers with schedules 14 days in advance. When schedule changes are made with less than two-weeks’ notice, the employer must provide premium pay, with the amount increasing the closer the change is to the start of the shift. While focused on scheduling, the law also includes other provisions to protect workers, such as a rule that businesses must offer available shifts to current employees before hiring new staff.

New York City’s policy has measurably benefited local fast food workers. The law covered 327,000 workers who weren’t previously protected, and over the first three years, the City secured nearly $2.6M in restitution payments for workers whose employers had violated the law’s provisions.

Taking Action

For local leaders seeking to improve job quality for their residents, providing living wages, paid sick leave, and predictable schedules are strong places to start. Despite their differences, the successful enactments of these strategies in Flagstaff, Pittsburgh, and New York City have shown that change is possible, and that local governments can be powerful actors in improving workers’ lives.

Need help getting started in your community? Check out the links below:

• To understand job quality for your community, and to understand the tools local leaders have at their disposal, see Results for America’s Job Quality Playbook.

• To assess the quality of jobs in your community, see Results for America’s protecting worker well-being Strategy Guide.

• To learn more about Flagstaff’s Living Wage Law, see Results for America’s living wages case study.

• To learn more about Pittsburgh’s Paid Sick Days Law, see Results for America’s paid sick days case study.

• To learn more about New York City’s Fair Workweek Law, see Results for America’s fair workweek case study.