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,”...