Speaking of Psychology - How job loss and economic stress affect workers and their families, with Anna Gassman-Pines, PhD

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

For many Americans, the past two-and-a-half years have been a time of economic turmoil. Anna Gassman-Pines, PhD, of Duke University, talks about how job loss, unstable work schedules and other hardships affect workers, their families and even entire communities, and about how working families – particularly low-wage workers – fared through the pandemic. Links Anna Gassman-Pines, PhD Speaking of Psychology Homepage Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many American families, the past two and a half years have been a time of economic turmoil. At the beginning of the pandemic, millions of workers lost their jobs and hourly workers in service industries were especially hit hard. Now unemployment is down, but inflation is up, and so are fears about a possible recession. This kind of instability and economic hardship affects more than just workers themselves. When people lose their jobs or have to cope with unstable, work schedules and incomes. The effects spill over to their families, their children, even entire communities. Research has linked job loss to everything from mental health problems to children's lower test scores in school. So how have workers, especially low-wage workers and their families,

fared over the past two and a half years? How are they doing now compared with March 2020? Did government interventions such as expanded unemployment insurance and other programs make a difference in people's lives. And what is needed now? More broadly, what have researchers learned from the pandemic that could inform employment and economic policies going forward? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Anna Gassman-Pines, a professor of public policy, psychology, and neuroscience at Duke. University. Her research focuses on how work and employment and welfare policies affect families,

family life, and well-being, particularly for low-age and hourly workers. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Gassman-Pines has also been closely following how job loss, childcare interruptions, and other pandemic-related disruptions have affected these families. Her research has been supported by grants from the APA, the National Science Foundation, the National Head Start Association, and the National Institute of Mental Health, among others. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Gassman Pines. Thank you so much for having me. For the past couple of years, you've been studying how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected

low-wage working families. In a lot of ways, this work started because you were in the right place at the right time. Can you tell us about that? Who are the people you've been following over the course of the pandemic, and what are the research questions you've been asking them? Sure. So the work that I've been doing during the pandemic actually started way before the pandemic was even a glimmer in anyone's eye. I had been planning a study really trying to understand both how common, unpredictable, and unstable work schedules are for low-wage workers in the service sector,

the consequences of those unpredictable work schedules for family well-being, and whether policy changes that aim to regulate work schedules could improve. improve working conditions and possibly improve family well-being at the same time. And so to do that work, my colleague Elizabeth Ananat and I recruited a sample of about a thousand hourly service workers who are working in retail jobs, in the food service sector, and in hotels, all of whom who had a young child between the ages of two and seven, because that's the time for parents when navigating and negotiating and negotiating and balancing work and family is particularly challenging. And the goal was to follow those workers over time to ask and understand those research questions.

We did this work in the city of Philadelphia because the city of Philadelphia was about to implement a new policy called the Fair Workweek Standard that was going to start regulating work schedules for hourly service workers in April of 2020. We went back into the field shortly before then in February of 2020. to do another round of data collection with these families. And so we were actually in the field surveying these parents about work, about their well-being, about family life, right at the moment that so many of us remember so well when everything changed,

when schools closed, when stay-at-home orders were issued, when non-essential businesses were closed. And we were really able to see, with those survey resources, responses almost in real time as our own lives as working parents was turned upside down, just how quickly these families' lives were turned upside down, how quickly people lost connections to work, and how much family well-being suffered in the immediate aftermath of all of those closures and changes. So what are the factors that were most salient as you were looking at all of this?

What were the outcomes that you found? We asked parents about their own mood. How are they feeling? Are they feeling anxious, depressed, worried? We asked them how their children were doing. So for young children, sometimes if they're feeling anxious or worried, they might cry or be clingy, the way that adults might be. But sometimes when young children are feeling stressed or worried, they act out. So they might be uncooperative, for example.

And so we asked parents about whether their children had been. more uncooperative or whether they had seemed more worried or sad. And what we saw is that in the early phase of the pandemic, both parents' mood and mental health was worse, and so was children, right? So parents were telling us their children were more uncooperative than usual. They were seeming more sad and worried. And that was particularly true for families who were really hard hit in those early days in the pandemic. So families where the parents were doing more care work, whether for children or older adults, where parents had lost jobs, where families had lost income, where people in that family had been feeling sick, those things really accumulated.

And when families experienced multiple hardships related to the pandemic, both parents and children's mental health was much worse in those early days. Over the course of the pandemic, government programs tried to buffer people against some of the effects that you're talking about. Programs like expanded unemployment insurance and SNAP benefits, which help people buy food. Did the people in your study actually benefit from these programs? Did the programs make a difference that you could really measure and see? We were able to ask folks about a lot of different supports that they might have received from the government during the pandemic. So you mentioned some of them. Expanded eligibility and

generosity of unemployment insurance, SNAP benefits, single stimulus payments. There were several times during 2020 and 2021 when the government simply sent checks to people around the country, and also the child tax credit where eligibility was expanded and it went from a lump sum payment to a monthly payment for the last six months of 2021. Taken together what we see is a few things. So number one, those policy supports did make a huge difference for families, especially in terms of buffering very large income losses. So this was a time when many of the parents in our sample had been laid off, or those who were still working had had their hours reduced. And so those set of government supports definitely buffered large income losses. They also reduced material hardship, so things like reporting that your family doesn't have an

money for food or that you're worrying that you're going to run out of money for food or worrying that you can't pay enough rent. So the set of government supports reduced material hardship as well. And we also have some evidence that especially the more generous policies like the expanded unemployment insurance also improved mental health, especially for workers who had been laid off. What about the timing of these benefits? And what did you find with respect to when people are getting certain things. The fact that one of these benefits was the child benefits that you were talking about, it used to be a lump sum, and then it was given on a monthly basis. Did that make a big difference? Could you look at what was happening before when it was a lump sum, and then what

happened as it was being doled out on a monthly basis? Yeah, so we're still working on that specific question, but other researchers, including my colleague and collaborator, Elizabeth Anonaut, have also been looking at that using other data sources. And what we're learning, from across the psychological science and social science of this issue is that those monthly child tax credit payments definitely reduced financial distress and material hardship for families with children. Now, you've looked at the timing of SNAP payments and when a family gets that money, if it comes at the beginning of the month, and what happens to the children over the course

of that month? How are they faring as the money is being spent? So one of the things I found in my work is that SNAP benefits are the children. are a really crucial support for low-income families, but they don't last the whole month. So they're designed to last for a whole month, but they tend to run out, and they run out for most families after about two weeks.

And so what that means is in that second half of the month, when those benefits have run out, things are actually really different from those families than they are in the first half of the month. So first of all, parents are much more worried about having enough money for food, and actually in some cases report eating less or eating different types of food than they might prefer if they had more money available. Parents report relying more on other sources of

nutrition assistance like borrowing money from friends and family or using other non-government supports like backpack programs at their child's school. And finally, I've also shown that these things can together accumulate and actually affect children's tax. test scores. So when children sit down at the end of a snap month to take a end of the year exam, like a reading or math achievement test that public school students across the country take, if they're sitting down to take that test at the end of the snap month, they actually do slightly worse on that test than if they would have sat down to take that test right after their family got those benefits. And some of these kids were relying on getting free lunches at

school, and then they weren't in school anymore. So what happens to the money? You've got to cover meals that were being paid for elsewhere. That's right. And so what we've found in other work that I've been doing is that when schools closed, that was a particularly vulnerable time for families who were relying on school meals and other kinds of nutritional supports that were provided through schools, like backpack programs where food gets set home on the weekend. And my colleagues and I have actually shown that right when schools closed at that same moment in mid-March, for low-income families, who were relying on school meals, food insecurity increased substantially after those schools were

closed. Now, I should say that there have been policy changes during the pandemic that have also sought to increase nutritional support for families that were relying on school meals, primarily by essentially paying families out the money that schools would have used to buy the food for school lunch and school breakfast. But of course, those payments didn't come until several. months later, and right when school's closed, families had food need right away. Yeah, so how does your pandemic research fit in with what we know from previous research about what people need from benefits programs? And what makes these programs more or less effective? So there are several ways in which what we've learned during the pandemic

isn't necessarily something brand new, but really making even clearer, really shining a light on some things that we had been learning before. So, for example, the unemployment insurance system is our main policy response when people are laid off from jobs, but it is set up to be difficult to access. And the idea of that is that's a policy choice that many state policy makers have made. And the idea is, if we make this difficult to access, then only the people who really need it will go through the hoops and the hurdles to get their benefits. What actually happens in practice is that the folks who are struggling the most,

who are facing the most life challenges and therefore need to support the most, often have the most trouble accessing benefits. And it's really people who are more advantaged, who have more practice and support for navigating complex systems are the ones that can achieve the goal of getting those benefits. and that all became much more challenging during COVID. So here's a system that is set up to be difficult to access. All of a sudden there was a huge need in 2020 where so many people were being laid off.

And the system was just not set up to be user-friendly, to be smooth, and to be easy for people to get through. And those barriers already existed before the pandemic and were really made much more challenging during the pandemic. So a lesson is, you know, we might reflect on, is this the kind of support that we want to actually make easier? There are ways of reducing so-called administrative burdens to make government programs easier for folks to access.

And that's a policy choice that we, you know, that we could decide to make. Did you see that happening? Or is that really a case of legislators having to step in and carry the water on this? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there are a lot of advocates on the ground who also, I know, do really important work shedding light on some of these issues for especially state legislators to understand the importance of these supports, to understand the importance of making them easier to access. And, you know, one thing that I think the pandemic has done in many ways is helped lots of folks to see that sometimes there are circumstances outside or control. that really change our work lives, for example, or really change our need for supports for caregiving. And that can happen to anyone. It's not just poor people. It's not just hourly service workers.

And hopefully we'll be able to reflect on that. And moving forward, think about ways to make these programs easier for lots of different people to access when they need them. You've been studying job loss and economic recessions since before the pan. So let's talk a little more broadly about that research. Some of your findings that are especially interesting center around how job loss affects whole communities. And you have found that when there's a lot of job loss in a geographic area, it can affect an entire community, even the people who haven't lost their jobs.

And it can show up in very wide-ranging ways. Can you talk about what it is that you found? Sure. So my colleagues and I have done a series of studies that really highlight the ways that that large-scale layoffs when lots of people in a community lose jobs, that has all kinds of ripple effects throughout the community that go well beyond the workers themselves who are affected. And I think we can all have all been able to see that so much more during the pandemic. But it was true before the pandemic too.

So, for example, I'm here at Duke University. I'm in North Carolina. North Carolina is a state that at one time had a tremendous amount of tech. textile manufacturing, and there were many communities in North Carolina where lots of adults in the community were working in textile mills. And when those mills closed, lots of people lost work. Now, not every adult in the community, because of course, there were still police officers, teachers, nurses, right? But nevertheless, when there were large-scale job losses where a lot of people in the community lost work at the same time.

It changed so many things about how youth imagined where they could go in life, right? So looking around and saying, well, my parent is still employed, but I'm seeing my classmate or my friend, right, or my peers' parent has just lost a job at that textile mill. That was a job that was, I thought, might always be there. And now I don't know if that's, you know, that's not available to me anymore. A lot of families experience economic strain, even though those adults continue to work. So maybe it's the waitress whose restaurant was across the street from the textile mill,

and folks aren't coming across the street for lunch anymore. So she's taking home less than tips. Even though she still has a job, her earnings have gone down. And that family may be feeling more crunched and be feeling more economic strain and worry. So it's not just the affected workers, but actually, you know, these ripple effects. that go out from the center and can really be harmful for other adults, but also for, especially for youth in those communities. I think you also found some impacts on things like college attendance, children's test scores, and even suicide rates. It sounds like it's very widespread

and complex. That's right. So, and this is especially true again for for adolescents. So adolescents being a time when young people are figuring out so many, things about their identity. Who are they going to, you know, who are they going to become as an adult, this kind of bridge between childhood and adulthood, so much reflecting on who am I going to be, what's important to me, what are my educational and career goals. And what we found in our work is that when there are these community-wide job losses, youth in those communities are affected in a range of ways. So we find that youth's test scores suffer. So those same kind of end grade reading and math achievement tests. Adolescents perform worse on those tests when

they're in a community that's just experienced these job losses. They become less likely to go to college, and that's particularly true for low-income adolescents. And they have more mental health problems. That's particularly true for girls. But, you know, this is a very stressful experience. And again, to be in a community that's going through these kinds of changes where so many adults and peers are affected, we did see that when youth are living in a place that's experienced these large job losses, really serious mental health problems, like considering suicide, actually go up. Why would girls be more affected? I'm just curious to know about that. Do you have any ideas? So that's something we've, you know, wondered about quite a bit. Is it differences in

how much girls are kind of internalizing their feelings and when they're feeling stressed, those are kind of because of different socialization. A lot of that is getting kind of kept inside. Boys perhaps might be more likely to externalize those feelings in ways that show up, you know, not in depression or suicide, but in other kind of acting out behavior. So there could be, you know, several different reasons. Another longstanding area of interest for you has been how unpredictable and chaotic work schedules affect people's family life and their children. Now, as someone who spent years on shift work as a reporter, I can tell you it is physically

punishing. But what have you found in your research regarding the effect on families and children? Several things. I mean, one thing we find is that especially for service workers, so for folks working for low wages, in retail, in food service, in hotels. Unpredictable work schedules are incredibly common. So this is just part of what it means to have those jobs. So for example, one thing we do is we ask folks to answer these short surveys every day for a whole month.

So we're getting really detailed information about what happened every day. Did you go to work? When did you start and stop? Were those the hours that were originally on your schedule? If you didn't work, were you supposed to work, had shifts been on the schedule that got taken off? And what we find is that on 10% of the days, these workers had some kind of unexpected change to their schedule, whether it was a change in hours, a canceled shift, a shift that got added on at the last minute. So 10% might sound low, but, you know, that is three days out of the month, every month, right? something did not go as planned, and then this causes a ripple effect for families in terms of having

to rearrange child care, right? So if you get a shift added on that wasn't on the original schedule that was posted, and all of a sudden you're told, we're going to need you to work tomorrow morning, now there's a scramble for finding childcare. Because, again, the parents in our sample have young children who cannot be left alone. They need to be in care of some sort. So one thing is this is incredibly common when it happens, it leads to all kinds of other challenges, especially around finding care for children. And it is incredibly stressful for parents. So parents report much worse mood on days when this happens compared to the same parents on days when work goes as planned. So when we get these detailed survey reports, we're actually able to compare, right?

How do you feel on a day when you work, the hours that were on that schedule originally, compared to a day when you get told that you need to stay late or you get sent home early? And it's incredibly stressful. And parents report much worse mood. We're also seeing some emerging evidence, and it relates to your own personal experience, that parents' sleep quality is also affected when their work schedules are changed. and on days with these kinds of unexpected changes, parents say that they're sleeping worse. You mentioned earlier the Fair Workweek Law in Pennsylvania that you were planning to look at,

and some of these laws may address these problems. What is the research into how well these laws work and whether they make a difference in people's lives? So our work in Philadelphia is ongoing, but I can tell you, we also did a smaller-scale version of this work in the city of Emoryville, California, which was one of the early leaders in passing a fair work week policy change. And what we found in Emoryville are several things. So first of all, the Emeryville Fair Workweek Ordinance reduced the instances of the kinds of unstable work schedules that I just described.

So in Emoryville, very, very small businesses, kind of family-run businesses weren't covered by the ordinance, but larger businesses were. And so what we were able to do is look at differences in works schedules. schedules between the small businesses and the larger businesses, both before the law change and after. And what we see is basically that after that law went into effect, those changes to work schedules decreased right away in the large businesses. So they end up looking a lot more like the small businesses. And so those instances of unstable work schedules are much lower after the law goes into effect. How do those laws work? Can you actually say to a business, you can't schedule

somebody to stop work at 7 o'clock in the morning and then come back at 7 o'clock at night, like what airlines do to keep people able to fly and not crash the plane. That's right. So the way these laws work, and they're a little bit different in the different cities where they are on the books right now, but they have the same sort of general structure. And the way the structure works is, they say, okay, large employers, you need to give your workers a certain amount of advance notice of their work schedule. So sometimes it's 10 days, sometimes it's 14 days. And you need to post that schedule in a place that is visible to all employees.

And if you want to change the schedule within the 10 or 14 days, that's okay. But you need to compensate people for those schedule changes. That's the really crucial difference. So it's not saying you can never make a change to the work schedule or even a last minute change. But what it is saying is that if you need to change the schedule, you have to compensate those employees because they were making their life plans. They were holding that time based on what you originally posted. And then what the compensation, what that means also, again, kind of varies.

But it might say, for example, look, if you cancel someone's shift, you have to pay them for half of the shift because they were holding that time on their schedule. And so if you're going to cancel it, they need to be compensated for having held that time. If you want to add hours to a shift, you might need to pay a little bit of extra, almost like overtime. Again, because those are additional hours that the person wasn't originally scheduled. And it turns out that employers really don't want to have to pay when they change people's shifts. The emerging evidences, they would actually rather stick with the shifts that are posted in advance. And so, for example, in Emeryville, the instances of canceled shifts went down because presumably those employers did not want to have to pay that compensation for having canceled a shift.

One piece of economic news that seems inescapable right now is inflation. I know that's not really an area where you're necessarily working, but I'm just wondering if there's any research, if you're seeing anything regarding the effects of inflation on people's mental health and well-being, or is it just too soon to say? Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably going to be a lot more psychological science and social science coming out about inflation. But what I can say is that, you know, for low-wage workers, even before the pandemic, they were living day-to-day with a lot of precarity. So many people have jobs where shifts might get changed,

hours might be irregular, there may be other work stressors. But for folks who are in higher wage, higher earning jobs, there's often a lot of different ways to buffer some of the negative effects of that instability or unpredictability. For low wage workers, that's never been the case. And so any changes that make that kind of balancing act more difficult are going to increase stress and financial strength for those families. So I can imagine, for example, that we will learn, and I'm sure it's true right now, that for people with lower incomes, inflation is really making a difference in terms of their ability

to meet their family's basic needs and to balance the competing demands of work and care. So what's next in your research? Are you continuing to follow the families you've been following since the beginning of the pandemic? So we've just finished what I think will be our last round of surveying these folks. We are just so grateful to the families in our study for having stuck with us for two and a half years through a very challenging time. And what we're working on now is a book-length project, really trying to put it all together, both to understand how difficult the pandemic was, but also the way that these unconventional

policy responses really did make a difference in family's lives. And the hope is by being able to reflect across all that we've learned. over the last two and a half years, this research might really shed light on a different path forward that will provide a stronger safety net and more stability and predictability for low-income families into the future. Dr. Gassman Pines, thank you for joining us today.

This has been really interesting. Thank you. Thank you so much for having you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.w.compan or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology

at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.