When the pandemic hit the United States in March of 2020, Anna Gassman-Pines and her colleague Elizabeth Ananat were already conducting a text message survey among service workers who had children. As early-pandemic lockdowns and business closures began, Gassman-Pines and Ananat were able to pivot and began asking the people they were surveying about job and income loss, challenges that stemmed from school and childcare shifts, whether they were able to access government benefits, and about their own mental health. In this podcast episode Gassman-Pines offers an overview of their findings and discusses how what they learned fits within the larger context of low-wage work in the United States. Transcript:  Dave Chancellor: [00:00:04] 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. I'm Dave Chancellor and, for this episode, I got to speak with Anna Gassman-Pines about the experiences early in the COVID-19 pandemic of parents who worked in service occupations. Now, before the start of the pandemic, Gassman-Pines and her colleagues were already doing a text message survey with workers that looked especially at how the precariousness of their work schedules affected other areas of their lives. And so when the pandemic hit, they were able to pivot and ask about many of the issues that especially impacted lower earning parents like income loss, shifts to remote learning or changes in child care challenges, accessing benefits, and mental health struggles. And even though we're around a year and a half into the pandemic, these are things that many families are still very much working through today. So let's turn to the interview. Dr. Gassman-Pines, thanks for being here for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast. So you are the WLF BASS Connections Associate Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at Duke University, right? Can you tell me a little bit about the kind of research that you do? Anna Gassman-Pines [00:01:21] Absolutely, and thanks so much for having me. My research focuses on understanding contextual influences on the well-being of low income children in the United States, and in particular, I'm interested in really understanding how parents experiences outside the home in labor markets, in low wage jobs, accessing social services spill over to the home and ultimately affect families and children's well-being. Chancellor [00:01:51] Today we're talking about how lower income working parents were kind of doing in the early months of the COVID 19 pandemic and you have a study that you've done with Elizabeth Ananat that ended up giving us a lot of insights into the picture of people's day to day. But that's not how the two of you kind of originally set out to do this study, right? What was the actual plan here? Gassman-Pines [00:02:14] That's right. So at the beginning of this study, we were interested in two big questions. One is understanding how common schedule changes are for hourly working parents who are working in the service sector. So working in retail, food service or hotel jobs. How common is it for their work schedule to be changed from the schedule that was originally posted or shared with them? And what are the consequences of those schedule changes for the well-being of both those parents and their children? So that was the first big question. The second big question was to try to understand whether. Local regulations that hold service sector employers that they had to give their employees more advance notice and to compensate their employees for changes made to the work schedule after it was shared would either alter the likelihood of those last minute changes or make their consequences less negative for those families. So, in other words, would a local law that tries to make schedules more predictable, improve well-being for working parents and their families, either by making schedule changes les