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Many U.S. workers struggle with financial challenges. Human service organizations (HSOs) can consider ways to better promote financial well-being among staff, especially lower-wage, frontline workers. In addition to raising pay, HSOs can improve benefits and working conditions in ways that will meaningfully affect staff's financial well-being, such as offering wage-tiered health insurance premiums, financial counseling, access to public benefits, and giving staff more control over their schedules. Doing so will help HSOs strengthen their commitments to social and economic justice, yet financial challenges among nonprofit HSOs – especially those that are minority-led and/or -serving – require changes in public policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge concerning the reconciliation of work and life in developing countries with weak labour protection and little governmental support (e.g. statutory work–life support) is still very limited. In this mixed‐method study, we explore how employees manage their work and nonwork responsibilities in Lebanon—a developing country with poor national and organisational work–life support. Findings from a qualitative study of 10 blue‐ (BC),10 white‐collar (WC) workers and 10 HR professionals from companies in various industries identified contextual challenges and strategies to reconcile work and nonwork responsibilities. In a quantitative study based on a survey of 269 employees, we examined the effect of family supportive supervisor behaviour (FSSB) for different groups of workers and explored one potential mechanism of FSSB, namely, schedule fit. Results show that FSSB increases employees' perceptions of schedule fit, which, in turn, minimises their work–life conflict (WLC). We also found that BC workers seem to benefit more from FSSB than WC workers. We inform work–life research on less supportive contexts and offer practical recommendations for HR managers to operate successfully within these environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working through platforms is a recent but fast-growing phenomenon, with obvious implications for workers' rights. Discussions have so far focused on the status of platform-based workers, but, recently, a growing consensus is emerging by courts around the world that workers for platforms such as Uber are in fact employees. As a result, legal disputes are likely to shift, to a large extent, from status questions to working-time questions. This might seem like a very specific issue, but, in fact, it has crucial implications for the entire model of platform work, and addressing this question requires us to rethink some of the fundamental pillars of labour law, notably whether more room should be opened for flexibility and individual choice within this system. We argue that one aspect of the platform model – 'work on demand,' which allows workers to log into the app whenever they wish to do so – poses a difficulty. Workers should be compensated for the time they are 'on call' and available to work. But platforms can be expected to respond by assigning workers to pre-set shifts to avoid paying for an unknown amount of working hours, thereby dismantling the 'on-demand' model. Such a change would be welcomed by many employees, who will gain more security, but others can be expected to object to losing the flexibility which they value. We consider possible solutions that could allow workers to choose the 'on-demand' model. While rejecting the possibility of allowing employees to waive on-call compensation rights, we consider several intermediate solutions that ensure partial payments for this time or exempt employees with another full-time job. The proposed solutions are based on the understanding that more choice is preferable in labour law as long as we can protect the interests of the affected employees and eliminate the externalities that some choices might generate for other workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The relationship between pitch volume and injury is well-represented within baseball literature. However, the impact of softball pitch volume on injury epidemiology is limited. Hypothesis: The purpose was to determine if increased pitch volumes in high school–aged softball pitchers are related to increased rates of subjectively reported pain/injury. We hypothesized that pitchers with increased volumes would have higher pain/injury rates. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Level of Evidence: Level 4. Methods: A total of 28 female softball pitchers (aged 14-18 years) completed an online survey of questions pertaining to pitching history, pitch volume, and subjective report of pain or injury in the back, shoulder, and elbow. An independent-samples t test was used to (1) compare pitch volumes in those who reported pain in individual body regions (shoulder, elbow, back) compared with those who did not; (2) compare pitch volumes in those who reported pain in 0 or 1 of the regions of interest compared with 2 or 3 regions; and (3) compare the reported percentage of the past year that players reported playing through pain in players who averaged >85 compared with <85 pitches per game. Chi-square analysis was used to compare those who pitched either >85 or <85 pitches per game with regard to frequency of shoulder pain, elbow pain, back pain, seeking of medical attention, and actual injury diagnosis. Type I error was set at α = 0.05. Results: Weekly and yearly pitch counts were higher in those reporting pain or injury (YES) than those who did not (NO) in the shoulder (pitches per week: NO = 219 ± 35; YES = 429 ± 101; P = 0.027) (pitches per year: NO = 8876 ± 946; YES = 19,195 ± 4944; P = 0.022) and back (pitches per week: NO = 188 ± 16; YES = 426 ± 90; P = 0.014) (pitches per year: NO = 8334 ± 793; YES = 18,252 ± 4340; P = 0.027). Similar results were observed for those with pain or injury reported in 2 or 3 regions compared with 0 or 1 regions (pitches per week: NO = 220 ± 38; YES = 414 ± 95; P = 0.039) (pitches per year: NO = 8765 ± 1010; YES = 18,661 ± 4623; P = 0.028). Those reporting shoulder pain or injury also reported higher pitch counts per game (NO = 71.4 ± 5.2; YES = 83 ± 4; P = 0.049), and those reporting back pain also reported playing more games per week (NO = 2.7 ± 0.2; YES = 5.2 ± 1.1; P = 0.034). Those with pitch counts of >85/game were more than twice as likely to see a physician regarding pain/injury (P = 0.027) and reported playing through pain a higher percentage of the year (>85, 49.3% ± 10%; <85, 25.2% ± 6%; P < 0.05). Conclusion: High pitching volumes commonly prevalent in high school–aged softball pitchers may be associated with increased pain/injury and appear related to cumulative volume. Clinical Relevance: This study provides recommendations for cumulative pitch volume guidelines in softball pitchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue showcases recent scholarship that clarifies the nature of inequality as it emerges at the intersection of today's workplaces and homes. We bring together scholarly works presented during the Work and Family Researchers Network conferences from 2018 and 2020. These articles provide a foundation for the development of future knowledge that advances equality at work and home, paying special attention to the complex nature of work and family in diverse contexts. Our introduction to the issue further highlights the need to amplify the voices and experiences of marginalised groups of people around the world who have received limited attention in the work and family literature. We conclude by offering suggestions of the role each of us can play in helping the work-family field become more inclusive and expanding ways of knowing that better represent work-family occurrences across diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We broaden contemporary understandings of the relationship between HR practices that support work-life balance and organizational as well as individual outcomes, through a focus on perceptual discrepancies of entitlement. To theorize this notion, we adopt the self-perception accuracy model and extend it by investigating whether any employee/management discrepancies in perceptions of entitlement mediate the relationship between HR practices supporting work-life balance and outcomes. We use data from 20 European countries and apply a multilevel statistical methodology. Our results did not reveal significant mediation effects, but the perceptions of managers, not of employees, are related to HR practices that support work-life balance. Furthermore, employees tend to have higher expectations of entitlement than does management. Finally, the more aligned management and employee perceptions of entitlement, the higher the positive organizational and individual outcomes over and above contextual idiosyncrasies. Findings denote that, in achieving positive outcomes for employees and organizations, managing perceptions regarding organizational support for work-life balance is more important than actual support practices. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unpredictability is a distinctive dimension of working time that has been examined primarily in the context of unplanned overtime and in male-dominated occupations. The authors assess the extent to which female employees in low-skilled retail jobs whose work schedules are unpredictable report greater work-life conflict than do their counterparts with more predictable work schedules and whether employee input into work schedules reduces work-life conflict. Data include measures from employee surveys and firm records for a sample of hourly female workers employed across 21 stores of a U.S. women’s apparel retailer. Results demonstrate that, independent of other dimensions of nonstandard work hours, unpredictability is positively associated with three outcomes: general work-life conflict, time-based conflict, and strain-based conflict as measured by perceived employee stress. Employee input into work schedules is negatively related to these outcomes. Little evidence was found that schedule input moderates the association between unpredictable working time and work-life conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helping behaviors are considered critical for business and societal recovery in light of economic crises and natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic that has both economic and health disaster elements. However, because the current COVID-19 pandemic has both of these elements, it is unclear how helping may be impacted. Economic crisis research suggests that such events are associated with less helping, whereas disaster research suggests that such events are associated with greater helping. We pair the event system theory (Morgeson, F. P., Mitchell, T. R., & Liu, D. (2015). Event system theory: An event-oriented approach to the organizational sciences. Academy of Management Review, 40 (4), 515-537) with these two logics (economic downturn and disaster) to suggest that health and economic threats within the COVID-19 pandemic operate with potentially opposing forces on helping-related outcomes. To test these ideas at a macro-level, we examined internet search volume for recession, COVID-19, and interest in helping. At a micro-level, we examined the relationships between work- hour insecurity and perceived job-related COVID-19 risk—two salient COVID-19-related economic and health threats—and helping customers and coworkers. Consistent with economic crisis logic, macro-level concern about recession was negatively associated with interest in helping. Moreover, at the individual level, work-hour insecurity negatively predicted helping coworkers. Consistent with disaster logic, at the individual level, perceived job-related COVID-19 threat was positively associated with helping coworkers and negatively associated with helping customers. These findings suggest that the specific feature of the COVID-19 event system (economic versus health) and the target (organizational insiders versus outsiders) matter for shaping helping behavior. These findings have implications for helping during crises that involve economic and/or disaster elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American working conditions have deteriorated over the last 40 years. One commonly-noted change is the rise of nonstandard and unstable work schedules. Such schedules, especially when held by mothers, negatively affect family functioning and the well-being and development of children; they have implications for the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. This article describes and compares the working schedules—in terms of type, duration, and variability—of American mothers in 1990 and 2012 in an attempt to assess whether nonstandard and unstable schedules are growing more common. Analyses demonstrate that evening work has increased in prevalence for single mothers but not for their partnered peers. Mothers in both single-mother and two-partner households experienced considerably greater within-week schedule variability and higher likelihood of weekend work in 2012 than they did in 1990. These changes resulted from widespread shifts in the nature of work, especially affecting less educated mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of good work in terms of working time organisation by exploring the link between diverse working time practices and work intensity. Existing studies have demonstrated that non-standard working hours expose workers to the pressures of work intensification, which can be defined as the compression of work activities into a unit of time. This article expands existing knowledge by investigating how the outcomes of non-standard working hours differ by sector and occupation, as well as by incorporating detailed and comprehensive measures of working time organisation in the empirical analysis. Based on EWCS data from 2010 and 2015 for 28 EU countries, the empirical analysis uses multilevel regression models with workers nested within countries. The results show that non-standard working hours and employer-driven scheduling are, on average, linked to more intense work than regular daytime hours scheduled from Monday to Friday or under worker-led flexibility arrangements. Consistent with expectations, the study points to significant differences in this relationship between sectors and occupations. Among others, in low-skilled and routine occupations, and service sectors such as transport, commerce, hospitality and health, short hours of work and employer- led flexibility are associated with relatively more intense work. Even where workers have some control over their schedules, jobs in these areas are not linked to lower levels of work intensity. The findings also support the expectation of overwork in high-skilled jobs, where long hours of work and high levels of worker-led flexibility are linked to relatively more intense work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second decade of the 21st century, research on work and family from multiple disciplines flourished. The goal of this review is to capture the scope of this work–family literature and to highlight both the valuable advances and problematic omissions. In synthesizing this literature, the authors show that numerous scholars conducted studies and refined theories that addressed gender, but far fewer examined racial and class heterogeneity. They argue that examining heterogeneity changes the understanding of work–family relations. After briefly introducing the broad social, political, and economic context in which diverse work–family connections developed, this review uses this context to address the following three main themes, each with subtopics: (a) unpaid work including housework, parenting as work, and kin work; (b) paid work including work timing and hours, money (i.e., motherhood penalty, fatherhood bonus, marriage bonus, kin care penalty), relationships (i.e., coworkers, supervisors), and work experiences (i.e., complexity, autonomy, urgency); and (c) work–family policies (i.e., scheduling and child care). Given the breadth of the work–family literature, this review is not exhaustive but, rather, the authors synthesize key findings on each topic followed by a critique, especially with regard to the analyses of differences and inequalities around gender, race, ethnicity, and social class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates of the boundaryless career perspective have relied to a great extent on the assumption that actors take responsibility for their own career development and that they consequently take charge of developing their career competencies. In this provocation piece, we debate the obstructions to and potential ways to promote boundaryless careers in the gig economy, which—despite appearing on the surface to offer suitable conditions for boundaryless careers—suffers from numerous conditions that hinder such careers. Thus, boundaryless careers in the gig economy could be an oxymoron. In particular, we conjecture that intraorganisational and interorganisational career boundaries restrict gig workers' development of relevant career competencies and thus limit their mobility. We then put forward the notion that we have to consider moving away from traditional, employer‐centric human resource management and introduce new forms of network‐based and self‐organised human resource management practices (in the form of collaborative communities of practice) in order to diminish these boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]