Abstract
How does the experience of workplace stratification affect well-being? The effect of social comparisons that result from the experience of stratification have typically been measured with respect only to pay. However, the workplace is a core site of stratification, and research has shown that workers consider a wide variety of job characteristics beyond pay in evaluating their jobs. This paper evaluates work schedule quality in low-wage foodservice and retail as a job characteristic that workers draw upon as a source of comparison, by analyzing an original employer-identified survey of 1,049 respondents from 10 large, national companies. I first establish through free-text responses that frontline workers have multiple pathways to access information regarding coworkers' schedules. Next, I find that frontline workers are more likely to compare schedule quality to their coworkers, and compare wages between employers. I hypothesize that this difference may be in part due to the visibility of schedules in the workplace, and develop a theoretical distinction between context-specific and context-agnostic positional goods. Further, I find evidence of steep declines in schedule satisfaction, overall job satisfaction, and increases in turnover intentions when frontline workers feel they have worse schedules than their coworkers. In contrast, I find limited evidence for small to modest improvements when workers feel they are treated better than average. These findings demonstrate a clear inflection point around feelings of being treated worse than the average coworker, rather than the linear, incremental effect that is typically assumed in measurements of relative deprivation.