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Jobs in the service sector in the United States are precarious. Existing research documents the macrolevel fundamental causes of this precarity. We show how exposure to one dimension of precarious work can heighten vulnerability to other aspects of precarious employment, propagating employment disadvantage at a micro-level. We draw on new panel data from 1,812 hourly workers in retail and food service collected as part of The Shift Project to examine how exposure to precarious scheduling affects turnover and the mediating pathways that connect these two dimensions of temporal precarity. We find that precarious scheduling, including short advance notice and on-call shifts, significantly increases turnover and that these associations are partly mediated by work-life conflict and job dissatisfaction. We also find that this job turnover is associated with downward mobility in earnings. Our results show how exposure to precarious work can trigger a process of cumulative disadvantage and constrain intra-generational mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programming staff at PBS member stations in the United States regularly work to find a balance in scheduling power, negotiating expectations of the national organization PBS with those of their local communities. Primetime schedules from 147 PBS member stations from September 2005 were compared with the PBS national feed to determine a coefficient of scheduling power. Significant power coefficients ranged from 0.063 to 1.0. Stations licensed to local educational were the only group to have significantly different power coefficients. Follow-up interviews with selected station programmers suggest several themes work to shape power at member stations, most notably, localism. Future research should consider station size, budget and location. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]