Kess Ballentine and Meredith Slopen on the Impact of Points-Based Attendance Policies on Workers

[00:00:07] Molly Costanzo: Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My name is Molly Costanzo, and I am a scientist at IRP. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with Kess Ballentine and Meredith Slopen about their recent work focused on points-based attendance systems. A points-based attendance policy is an employer system that gives workers points for being late or missing work, and getting too many points can lead to punishment or possibly even job loss. Dr. Ballentine and Dr. Slopen have had one recent article published in the Journal of Community Work and Family focused on the prevalence and consequences of these types of systems, and another recent article in Health Affairs unpacking how these systems interact with paid leave policies. Dr. Ballentine is an assistant professor of social work at Wayne State University, and Dr. Slopen is an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare at Stony Brook University. Thank you both so much for being here today. To start, can you both tell me a little bit about yourself and your research generally? Let’s start with Dr. Ballentine, and then we’ll hear from Dr. Slopen.

[00:01:32] Kess Ballentine: Thanks again for having us, Molly. We really are excited to talk with you and the listeners of the podcast today. I work at Maine State University School of Social Work, and I originally was in kind of public school education and child mental health, and over time, working in a number of different systems, realized that there was a lot of system interaction, , both social welfare systems and non-social welfare systems like employment interacting to really meaningfully affect people’s lives, but that interaction was not really something I was seeing in the community being intervened upon, and that was really making people’s lives much more complicated, and for folks who are dealing with poverty, a lot worse in most cases. I’m really interested in how social institutions and the norms therein complicate people’s lives, and how we can make that better.

[00:02:30] Meredith Slopen: Hi, thanks again so much for having me. I worked for New York City government for many years before I returned back to do a PhD. I had been working in public health, and so a lot of my work really brings in that public health perspective and thinking about work as a social determinant of health. And so right now, my research is focused on sort of two related aspects. The first is how work conditions impact the health of working families. So, a lot of this work that we’ve done here, looking at points-based attendance systems, falls into that category. And then how labor policies affect the health and economic security of individuals, particularly at different points in their life where they struggle to maintain access to the labor market.

[00:03:13] Molly Costanzo: I want to turn to your recent papers. I’d love to hear from you all sort of the study’s origin story. What motivated you all and your co-authors to do this work? What got this rolling?

[00:03:26] Meredith Slopen: Yeah. So, this work has a very classic aspirational academic conference origin story. I saw Kess present her paper on how points-based attendance systems affect low-wage hospital workers in Pittsburgh. And that re-reminded me of a report that I’d read several years earlier that A Better Balance had published about the impact of point systems and how they were discriminatory against pregnant workers because they were at higher risk of being fired because they were accruing points for protected activities like attending prenatal care appointments. Danny Schneider, one of our co-authors, was the discussant in that session. And so months later, when New York City passed the Lawful Absence Act, which limited employer use of point systems, I reached out to Kess because I thought this might be an important opportunity to study the new law Especially because New York City laws are often replicated in other jurisdictions. So one of the things that’s really exciting about working in New York is that we often have the opportunity to pass progressive laws that are taken up in other places. And so the opportunity to learn from these programs is really important and helpful. So at the time we were looking around and there were no national estimates of how common these systems are, and particularly across different employers. So Kess’s work was focused on one employment system. The Walmart work has been focused, on one company. So we reached out to Danny and Kristen Harknett, whose Shift Project studies the working conditions of service sector workers, and asked them if they were interested in collaborating and including a points module in an upcoming survey. And we were really psyched that they were interested and agreed, because this was a great opportunity to collect data on this new and emerging issue where we didn’t know very much about what was happening across the United States. So that really allowed us to generate this baseline data which if these policies become more common nationally, will be really helpful in evaluating their utility going forward, not just for New York City, but in other jurisdictions as well. So that’s how this project came to be, and then we’ve been able to really think about how best to leverage this opportunity through these two papers.

[00:05:42] Molly Costanzo: That’s great, and I love to hear the classic academic origin story of a conference, connections, and deadlines pushing things forward. I’m wondering if you can give the listeners sort of the elevator pitch for both the study and the two papers. Kind of what were your research questions specifically and what did you find?

[00:06:05] Kess Ballentine: Sure. So, I want to just acknowledge one thing. If you talk to low-wage workers overall these are really common. So, everybody knows about these, but academics and empiricists don’t seem to know about it. Part of the motivation of doing this study was this is something that when I was just asking people, “Of all the work policies that affect you, what are the ones that matter?” This was the number one, and this was across all a variety of healthcare employers and hospitals in Pittsburgh. And then I started talking to other people, and it was like, “Oh yeah, of course we have that.” And so I think some of this is, it’s like why just find out how many? This is a pretty basic initial question, but it’s, as Meredith noted we don’t know how common these are. We know folks know they’re common, but as far as what’s the actual impact that these are having across a wide group of people, we really didn’t have that information. And so that was the main goal of this study. To get a sense of how common are these policies. And then, when you get points, what happens? So the module was based mostly on my prior research, but then also discussions with A Better Balance because they were talking with workers who either motivated the new law in New York or were now trying to use the new law in New York. So that was our goal. Who is affected? How bad is the effect? Why is it happening? So we asked a range of things like, do you have any such system? And these systems go under different names, so that was a little bit challenging. So we have a long list of every word we could think of that we’ve heard from workers or A Better Balance had heard from workers to try to indicate what we were talking about. And then if you did have a point system of some kind, you know, have you ever gotten points? What were they for? What was the consequence of getting those points? And then also, if you hadn’t gotten points, had you done anything on purpose to try to avoid getting points? And these questions really gave us great information. So, the first paper, which is community work and family paper basically goes through this prevalence and estimates about two in five workers had exposure to a point system. We estimate this is about 11 million food and service retail workers. So again, this is not all industries that are affected by it, but it means it’s a, quite a meaningful portion for industry. And then we also found that folks in poor health were disproportionately affected by these points, and also that there were a range of well-being concerns. So even for people who didn’t get any points happiness was worse and for workers who were in a, an employer that had point system. So we think there’s some spillover effect for every– or like stressor effect maybe, or strain effect for everybody who’s affected by this. But there’s lots of opportunities for future research based on that paper. And then the second interest, in part because Meredith’s an expert in paid sick leave and because we were worried from the first paper that people are n- going to work sick or avoiding healthcare appointments because of the point system. So then we were able to look at if people lived in a jurisdiction with a paid sick leave, like a city or state level paid sick leave law, or they were not, we could compare. And what we basically found is presenteeism is not significantly different. Presenteeism being going to work sick is not significantly different across jurisdictions among workers who have point systems. And we look at this in a couple of different ways in the paper. But overall, what we found was that exposure to a point system increased the likelihood of going to work sick by eighteen point nine percent. And overall, the point system is a stronger policy in people’s real lives. So avoiding the point system, they’re going to work sick, even if they have this state level. So this creates a lot of interesting questions about enforcement and marginalized workers’ ability to take advantage of protective laws, to speak up for their rights in the context of these punitive policies that are affecting them on a daily basis at work.

[00:10:27] Molly Costanzo: One thing that I was really interested in reading the paper, this module that you developed. I am very nerdily interested in how you developed a module because that is a lot of work right? And it takes this different set of skills. I’d love to hear more about that process.

[00:10:47] Kess Ballentine: I think the other zoomed out academic lesson from this project is that this is a really nice example of a qualitative finding giving us a lot of information about what is happening for people, looking at the literature and saying we don’t know some of this basic information. And then seeking out an opportunity to, get some of that basic information, which might beget additional qualitative work and certainly additional quantitative work since we’re only in a couple of industries here. One challenge we talked about was, like, how are we sorting people into this module? I think thinking through the skip logic is always a little bit challenging. You don’t wanna skip somebody out who you actually wanted to hear something from. So we had two paths here, right? If you if you had a point system or you didn’t. We definitely missed some people. There were a lot of questions about timeliness, how long had they been exposed to it are we sure they were exposed to it before the outcome? So there is definitely things that we weren’t able to do with this module that I think other methods, in the future hopefully we can look at. But we used my research largely to inform some of the follow-up questions like did you get a point for any of these reasons? And I don’t think we would’ve known those reasons had, had I not talked to so many workers. And then A Better Balance was able to check that and, pretty much agree, I think, that those were the areas. So these are things like, you know you were sick or injured including mental health, you had to care for an ill family member or loved one, you had to go to a meeting or a medical appointment for one of these people, et cetera. Then similarly, I had gotten a pretty good list from people of a range of things that happen when people get these points, like getting a worse schedule or not being recommended for a promotion or a new training. So one workplace that I interviewed people, if they had any points at all, they couldn’t do any transfers within the employer and they couldn’t do any promotions and they couldn’t do any trainings. And this was a one of the rare employers that had internal career ladders still. And so to do that you do training. I think for me it’s just troubling because there’s so much discussion of, this quote unquote, “meritocracy” we’re in, that if you work hard and you stick it out you can move up. One, we know that’s not true because lots of employers don’t have career ladders. But what I found is even employers that are pretty good and do have some of these opportunities, these point systems are undermining it. We wanted to get a sense of what was happening to people because of this. We also got a little bit about supervisor discretion and what people did to avoid it. Other things we thought about putting in but couldn’t really is, like, how severe is the point system? We thought about a lot of things, like could we say, how many points do you have and what’s the max for termination? We tried to be creative there, but we just couldn’t think of something that was evidence informed enough to ensure that we were gonna be able to interpret the data that we would’ve gotten. So I definitely think that future qualitative work could help inform an even broader and more effective way of measuring this. We were working with people who have done a ton of survey work Danny and Kristen, so that was really helpful. And the survey is very large, actually, their survey. And so we also looked through all the other data that’s available through the broader survey so that we could see what we could pull. And some things we didn’t end up having to ask that we might need because they were in other places.

[00:14:25] Meredith: Yeah, we were able to leverage Kess’s qualitative work, consult with both Danny and Kristen, who are experts in studying low-wage service sector work through surveys and also collaborate with A Better Balance. And I think that being able to triangulate really helped us effectively build a strong survey module. As you know with surveys, you always want to ask more than the space that you have. We went into this thinking we would get maybe two questions and thankfully the Shift team was very generous and gave us enough space to really ask some very detailed questions that I think allowed us to have a much richer understanding of how points systems are implemented and what the experience of workers are through this quantitative approach.

[00:15:14] Molly Costanzo: You all have talked a little bit about your findings, and I’m curious, sometimes when we’re doing research we find what we think we’re gonna find, and that’s great. That’s fine. And sometimes it doesn’t go that way at all and things are surprising. Was there anything that surprised you in this work?

[00:15:33] Meredith: Sure. On the topic of, developing the questions and the module, one surprising aspect that we didn’t specifically ask about and that I wish we had, is the number of respondents who noted that they received points related to the death of a loved one or to attend a funeral. So, this is an extremely common experience for many of us, right? People die routinely. People pass away. And socially, we have grieving rituals associated with that Those, ended up being a significant challenge to the employment of our respondents actually because people were receiving points. Because we only have this as the write-in to the other category, it’s not something we’re able to talk about in the paper, but I wish that we had asked it so that we would have a stronger sense of the extent that workers are impacted because I suspect that more than just the people who used the write-in category may have had this experience. I think the second finding that really surprised me, honestly, is I really think that paid sick leave works to reduce presenteeism. The literature on the whole shows that paid sick leave is an effective policy in reducing presenteeism. And in our study we found that in combination with these points policies, that the job security protections and paid sick leave are insufficient to reduce presenteeism. So that’s the second thing that really surprised me in our findings. And it opens, many questions of, so what do we do, right? What, h- how do we need to think about policy design, either through policies like the New York policy or through strengthening the enforcement mechanisms of paid sick leave in order to ensure that workers are able to access this right to use paid sick leave and therefore our communities can benefit from the reductions in disease transmission and other health benefits that have been shown to be associated with paid sick leave costs

[00:17:28] Kess Ballentine: Yeah, and just to put a hat on that, these are food service workers, these are retail workers. My original work is with healthcare workers. I’m currently working with nursing home workers who we’re finding have these point systems and are going to work sick on a regular basis. So the- these are the jobs where we really don’t want people going to work sick. Not that we want anyone to go to work sick. We want people to heal and be supported. But as far as the impact for the community, these are big hitters. Yeah, it’s very concerning. I think that the other thing that was surprising was, my original work is only with parents. And so I know that this matters for parents, and I documented people in my qualitative study who had very serious consequences like termination because of point systems due to kind of intersections of transit problems, housing policy, and parenthood, and having to care for children how that complicates your mornings and transit. And yet we did not find a significant difference between parents’ and non-parents’ experience of points. What we found was that they’re less likely to work somewhere that has points, so Are they actively avoiding? Have they already gotten fired and now they’re somewhere else? Did we not measure it in a way that got communicated to this subgroup? So I think there’s more there. We were really cautious not to say it doesn’t because I think that we know that we need more care infrastructure, and this is just one other possible piece of that bigger question.

[00:18:59] Molly Costanzo: I’m curious what you think are the primary takeaways for policymakers and policy researchers? What do you think we should all be thinking about as listeners, as researchers, as humans in the world when we think about punitive attendance policies and policy generally?

[00:19:19] Meredith: So, I could continue to talk about the implication, like the interconnections between point systems and the effectiveness of new paid sick leave laws. But what it really comes down to is, what do we need to have in place in our legal frameworks for workers to believe in government job security when their employers are putting in place these programs where they would lose their jobs right away? So research from Tom Lindeman and Heather Hill found that workers and employers don’t fully understand the job security provisions and paid leave policies, and I think we really see that come through in our findings. So what we find is that point systems effectively reduce the role of paid sick leave mandates to reduce presenteeism. And for our paid sick leave laws to work, we need more action to reduce point system use, to increase enforcement, and to really make these policies real in the lives of workers. Because if you lose your job, even if, eventually somebody finds that you were, given these points illegally or inappropriately, you’ve still lost that job. And in this moment, especially with the tightening relationship between work and access to benefits that many low-wage workers rely on, like SNAP and Medicaid losing that job is very consequential. And so I think the second policy implication, you know, related to the use of point systems is the consequences of losing a job in this policy regime because of this tightening. And H.R.1 really makes it even more important to ensure that workers can stay connected to their jobs, whether that’s through increased access to paid leave, whether that’s through limiting illegal use of points, or other policy mechanisms that might be brought to bear to support labor force connectivity during this time. Because people will not just be losing their job, they will also be losing access to benefits.

[00:21:16] Kess Ballentine: Yeah, and I think to build on that as far as implications for researchers, but also policymakers, which is maybe a more general observation, is this work highlights ways that kind of the siloed nature of the public-private in the US policy system the way that social goods like transit are, you know, separate from the way we talk about social welfare institutions like our, food security networks or education or public health. And so in this highly fragmented system where workers are expected on a daily basis to encompass and account for all of these policies. They’re thinking about their work hours. So that they can access food, they’re thinking about transit, They’re thinking about schools and where can they send their kids to school and be able to pick them up easily. There’s a lot of decisions that we’re putting all on individual people that are really community questions. How do we create a community that someone can actually successfully live and work and raise their kids with a reasonable amount of wellbeing. And not spend all of their energy, coordinating all these pieces so that they can follow their employer’s rules, their children’s school’s rules, the federal government’s rules, the state’s interpretation and specificity of those rules, the city and county policies and that interaction. Which is really now all centered on some of our least resourced, most stressed folks, not because of their own challenges, but because of the system that we’ve created. That is this carrot and stick system that, doesn’t see all of these things as facilitators of work, but sees it as, ways to punish or motivate. And I think the other, related piece that comes out a little bit more in my dissertation is- That we also haven’t really considered how to fully correct, meaningfully correct historical wrongs like redlining that have made it, in most places, impossible for people to afford housing anywhere near where they work, in at least the urban environments that I study. So that’s just one piece, of this broader puzzle that again, I think that there’s policy decisions being made with very little concept of the downstream effects, and very little accountability for those downstream effects. So one of the other projects I’m doing here in Detroit is to study industry standards boards, which is this kind of collaborative approach to say, “Okay, here’s an industry that’s large in, in the community. Let’s get employers, workers, and government agencies together to sit on a board and think about what is the impact of employer, community resources, and community policy, and what could we do to smooth it out in any way?” There’s some promise in the opportunity of these collaborative discussions that I think, one, you know, there’s a lot of complicated research to be done here because it’s really hard to do interdisciplinary community-based work that spans, food and child welfare and, labor and et cetera. But I think that’s kind of the new challenge, like the, that we need to start to look at more is actually, specializing less and specializing in how do we look at this fragmentation and actually help people either reduce it or navigate it. And how do we create a policy landscape locally that supports people in navigating these really disparate but interacting policy systems?

[00:24:58] Molly Costanzo: I’m wondering if you both can tell me what’s next for you either as it relates to work in this area related to point systems or anything else that you’re working on that you’re excited about.

[00:25:11] Meredith: you know, I’m continuing to work on evaluating policies that support employment, and especially thinking about co-occurring policies. There are so many policies that impact families at the time they welcome a child. There are so many policies that impact families when somebody becomes ill or is thinking about retirement. And often our approach has looked at these policies one by one. But we know that they interact, and so some of my, developing work is really thinking about those interactions and how they might how different combinations of policies might support or reduce connection to the labor force and people’s health. I’m also thinking a lot about, different points in the life course where people experience challenges. So whether that’s the onset of a disability or a health shock, whether that’s, thinking about, more about older workers. So much of what we know about paid family leave focuses on parental leave. There’s a lot of need to understand, especially as the Family Act is being reintroduced, how paid family and medical leave is used for these other use types. And an important role for advocates in ensuring that people know that they are able to use these policies for non-parental leave purposes.

[00:26:22] Kess Ballentine: I am continuing to kinda exercise this activity of praxis of trying to build the, these more kind of fundamental studies that say these are the way that these intersecting experiences are affecting people. How are multiple institutions competing or more rarely if working together to facilitate some kind of wellbeing or not? I’m, I have some articles coming out and other work that’s going to look at really diagnosing work and school and how is that? What does that actually look like? All policy work is really cultural work in the sense of like this is how we enforce who is successful, who is good, who is valued citizen, right? And so how is the way that we think about working parents or working folks with disabilities How do these policies communicate our culture? So that very much more academic theory-building work, and then supplementing that with the action work. So I’m working with a couple of unions right now, healthcare unions, to look at some of these issues and the interaction between policy and practice at their workplaces and their health outcomes, their long-term wellbeing outcomes, and then also really investing a lot in the Industry Standards Board here in Detroit to try to understand do these work and how. So I’m just curious, and so I’m in the last stages of a longitudinal study of this Industry Standards Board. And then we’ll see where we go from there based on what we find.

[00:27:55] Molly Costanzo: Thank you both so much. It’s been really wonderful to hear about this important work and what’s next for you both on the horizon. Is there anything else that we didn’t cover that you want listeners to know?

[00:28:09] Kess Ballentine: I think the thing that’s jumping to mind is just that I hope that people see this discussion as please be involved and speak up. And maybe if you don’t feel safe speaking up, trying to find opportunities to, ask about your rights, find out about your rights, demand that your state actually enforce laws that they passed to benefit you. And I think, as policy researchers, that’s the other side of the work that we can do, is how can we help facilitate that? Because ultimately, we can pass all these policies, but if people don’t understand them or don’t feel safe using them, then, there’s more work to do.

[00:28:47] Meredith: Yeah, I would just add that I think that, we all need to be paying attention to, in a more holistic way, to the full policy environment. Similar to how we research individual policies, we also see, individual policies passed. And if we’re not seeing the effect in a given jurisdiction that we would expect based on the literature, it might be because there are other policies and programs that are getting in the way of the intended effects of that policy, like we see with the relationship between point systems and paid sick leave. Often when we see that a policy isn’t working or a program isn’t working, the first response is to say, “Okay let’s get rid of it.” But often we need to invest more heavily in that policy or program and and understand how it might be impacted by the surrounding policy environment. And so I think that’s a real takeaway from our findings here.

[00:29:39] Molly Costanzo: Thank you both so much. I appreciate you and your work and your time talking with me today.

[00:29:46] Meredith: Thanks so much for having us, Molly.

[00:29:48] Kess Ballentine: Yeah. Thanks, Molly.

[00:29:50] Molly Costanzo: Thanks so much to Kess Ballentine and Meredith Sloppen for joining us to discuss their recent research on points-based attendance systems. We will link their published articles in the show notes. Please note that views expressed by our speakers don’t necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Institute for Research on Poverty or of any other sponsor, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Thanks for listening.