How are Municipal-Level Fair Workweek Laws Playing Out on the Ground? Experiences of Food Service and Retail Workers in Three Cities

An updated version of this paper was posted on December 09, 2025.

The first municipal-level law regulating employers’ scheduling practices was enacted in SanFrancisco in 2015. A decade later, ten municipalities and one state (Oregon) have passed what are referred to as fair workweek (FWW) laws, with additional municipalities considering adoption. FWW laws target lower-paid jobs in industries, such as retail and food service, in which a large proportion of employees face fluctuating, unpredictable hours over which they have little control. Each law includes a set of provisions that govern when and how employers inform workers of their schedules and make changes to work schedules with the goal of increasing schedule predictability, stability, adequacy, and control.

In this research brief, we investigate FWW laws in three cities. We examine several of the unique provisions of the laws to estimate the extent to which workers’ experiences in jobs covered by FWW laws align with legal requirements and whether scheduling practices are different for workers in comparable jobs located in adjacent municipalities without FWW laws. Understanding the extent to which each provision of FWW laws is affecting employees’ experiences of their work schedule is an essential step in evaluating the overall effects of FWW laws. If specific provisions are not implemented in practice, then the laws will fall short of policy intentions. Our goal is to provide information helpful for targeting education and enforcement efforts to improve the effectiveness of the laws for improving work schedules in covered jobs.

Our methodology employs on-line surveys of employees working in retail and food service establishments within (“covered”) or near (“uncovered”) three urban areas that have enacted fair workweek ordinances: Chicago, Seattle, and New York City. Survey respondents are paid participants in panels recruited through Qualtrics and its partners. Survey questions are customized to reflect variations in administrative rules across the three municipalities. Our research adds to other efforts assessing the implementation and potential benefits and drawbacks of FWW laws (e.g., Harknett, Schneider, and Irwin 2021a, 2021b; Ananat, Gassman-Pines, and Fitz-Henley 2022; Kwon and Raman 2023; Lambert, Haley, Cho, and Swanson 2022) by expanding current methodological approaches, knowledge on the implementation of specific provisions of FWW laws, and understanding of how differences in administrative rules across locales matter for workers’ experiences of their work schedule.