Far too many employees, especially those that are making wages that are on or below a living wage, suffer through the indignity of having very little control, if any, of the work hour time slots that they will work, as well as the amount of hours that they will work in a given week. That is to say, as companies have benefited in technology and knowhow, so as to reduce their inventory levels to being able to take advantage of "just in time inventory," they then have segued such into the labor part of their operations, in which their objective is for their employees to essentially be "just in time employees." This, thus means that those companies, want to and thereby demand that they be able to call in employees at a moment's notice to work, whenever and however long such should be needed, while on the other hand, they also maintain the power to forego employees and those hours that these employees were expecting to work, when they aren't as busy as anticipated. So then, the employers of such, are able to reduce their labor consumption by treating their employees as moveable objects, to utilize as those companies, best see fit.
All of the above is unfair to the employees, that do not receive consistent hours of weekly work, and further are placed into the unenviable position of knowing that their refusal or inability to work hours as dictated by their management, will lead them to being vulnerable to having either their hours of work being reduced, or less desirable hours to be worked, or both. As bad as all this may be, it is further unfair to those that are employees by virtue of the salient fact, that those that do not have a consistent and reliable work schedule, as well as a mandatory requirement that their employer pay them for a certain specific amount of hours each week, is that they are thereby stuck in a position of finding it difficult to properly attend to both family and personal affairs, as well as being able to successfully budget the monies that they did receive in compensation in a sustainable manner.
Additionally, those that are struggling with inconvenient work schedules that are inconsistent in both hours to be worked as well as hours scheduled at their company, are placed into a undeserved "catch-22" in which they are handicapped in finding a second job, by virtue of the fact that they don't currently have consistent and knowable hours, to thereupon be able to reliably schedule the hours that they would be available for that second job, which becomes even more problematic when the second job is also a job with inconsistent hours that vary from day to day and week to week.
This signifies that a construct in which employees suffer from inconsistent work hours in the sense of both hours worked as well as hours scheduled, means that they are being dealt with in an unfair manner that exploits them in a way in which they are essentially treated more as if they are beasts of burden, as compared to being treated as human beings, of merit, value, and real worth.