Starbucks is the leading coffee chain, and so the actions that it takes with regard to the social contract with its employees can have a major impact on the retail sector, or at least we can hope so. In direct response to a story in the NY Times by Jodi Kantor about the difficulties a Starbucks barista, Jannette Navarro, has encountered because of the company’s scheduling practices.

In a nutshell, Starbucks does not give its part-time workers steady hours, but instead uses scheduling tools — software — that assigns hours based on predictions of customer demand. And those scheduling changes means that workers may not know on Sunday what hours they are supposed to be working on the following weekend.

Jannette Navarro is perhaps the apex example, since she simply has everything working against her. A single mother of a 4-year-old son, Gavin, with little family support and no car, her juggling child care and commuting is a persistent near crisis.

As Kantor put it,

Like increasing numbers of low-income mothers and fathers, Ms. Navarro is at the center of a new collision that pits sophisticated workplace technology against some fundamental requirements of parenting, with particularly harsh consequences for poor single mothers. Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing. Managers are often compensated based on the efficiency of their staffing.

It’s not just Starbucks. The entire retail industry — with few exceptions — is operating around this model: the use of highly flexible scheduling software that makes a mish-mash of the lives of workers, most of whom are working less than 35 hours a week, and receiving little or no benefits.

Starbucks has received a great deal of praise for offering health benefits and stock options to all workers, as well as the recent announcement of a college education program, but now has come out — directly as a result of the Navarro profile in the NY Times — and promised to revise scheduling practices. In particular, they are committing to posting hours at least one week in advance.

To many labor organizers that is not considered a great breakthrough. Many chains work two or three weeks ahead on posting hours.

The challenge is not providing slightly greater lead time on the posting of hours. The true challenge isn’t even between the retailer and the workers. Our challenge is societal: the basic minimums of the social contract we require between workers and the businesses that employ them.

The reason that we have labor laws at all is simple: individual workers have little power and are disadvantaged by their need for a paycheck, while business management has great power, and the incentive to increase profits and productivity at the expense of other considerations.

What is becoming clear is that the government should regulate how businesses use their work policies in order to counter the destructive and inhumane impacts that they can have on our lives. However, with a hamstrung legislature, I won’t expect redress at any near date.

I am reminded of Adam Smith’s observation in The Wealth Of Nations:

Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.