Workers schedule their work like meetings.
Calendar software has always required an acceptance. Scheduling software assigns workers to shifts and never asks for one. POWER asks: the week is built as workers accept it, and a record of every shift belongs to the worker who worked it.
POWER Clearinghouse, the Proof Of Work Event Record, is a nonprofit standard for scheduled work. Patent pending. Stores are admitted one at a time.
For workers
Your turn, your shifts, your record.
- Everything you see is yours to take. When your turn opens, the email lists shifts you can claim right then. Tap one and it is on your schedule. No asking, no waiting for approval.
- Your turn is earned. The order is set by verified time worked and nothing else: time at this store, and time in the role. It is time, not anyone's opinion. Your turn email shows your position and the verified time behind it, and the same link shows it any time you want to look. Nothing else feeds the order, and the full rule is published with the protocol — no ratings, no favorites, nothing anyone can buy. New workers are eligible from day one, at the back of a line that moves.
- You can change your mind. Drop any shift before the week locks and it goes back to the others.
- Your record is yours. Every shift you work is written once, permanently, in your name, and persists beyond any one employer rather than resetting.
- Nothing to install. One email to say yes; your shifts land in the calendar you already use.
For stores
Takes the work of building the schedule off your desk.
- A calendar and an inbox, nothing else. Setup is a short exchange of emails. Your regular week goes in a calendar once and repeats; four weeks out, one email confirms it. No availability forms, no time-off requests.
- It fills as it is built. Workers accept in turn; a second calendar shows who has what.
- You are never left with an empty week. Anything unclaimed three weeks out comes back to you with the reasons in counts, early enough to act.
- Your rules, enforced everywhere. Hour limits, positions, lock timing: declared once, applied before any shift is offered.
- Every shift has a record. Who was offered what, who took it, who dropped it, when. Permanent, never edited, yours to pull.
- Your other tools keep their jobs. Timekeeping, payroll, and compliance stay where they are.
Who built it
Built by a former Massachusetts Future of Work commissioner and the co-founder and CEO of HourWork, which reached more than ten thousand hourly workplaces. He has built shift dispatch systems for four of the world's largest workforce and facilities services companies. He is joining the first stores' rosters as a new worker, at the back of the line.
How a week runs
The whole cycle, from both sides, including the parts that take a minute to get used to.
The store posts the week.
A manager keeps one calendar for the store, in whatever app they already use. Each event is a count, a position, and a time: "2 Cashiers, 5 to 10." Repeating events are the regular week; one-off events are additions. About four weeks out, the manager confirms the week by email. Nothing reaches workers from the calendar alone; the click is the moment it becomes real.
Workers hear when the week is open.
Everyone eligible gets an email when a week is posted, then a second when their own turn opens. Turns open in order of verified time worked, one after another. We call it the cascade. A worker at the back of the order still gets days to choose, not minutes.
Workers take shifts; the week fills.
Each turn email carries that worker's own list, opened from a link. There is no account and no password: the link is the identity. Tap a shift and it is yours if it is still open at that instant; if someone with the same turn took it a second earlier, the screen says exactly that. Being told no is normal, not a failure.
The week settles.
Three weeks out, anything unclaimed is shown to the manager with the reasons in counts: how many were at their hour limit, how many were unavailable. The manager covers it the way they always have, with three weeks in hand.
The week locks, then it is worked, then it is written down.
Two weeks out the schedule is final, which is the notice fair-workweek laws ask for, produced by the mechanism rather than layered on. After the week is worked, the store confirms what happened and each shift is written permanently to each worker's record. Only worked shifts count.
After a few rounds, it takes about a minute
The first week is new. By the third, both sides are doing almost nothing.
For a worker
An email arrives with the shifts you can take. Because turns run in order and yours has come, almost everything listed is yours if you want it. The shifts near the top tend to be the ones you have worked most, since that is what your standing is built from. Tap the ones you want and the week is done, usually in under a minute.
For a manager
Your regular week already lives in the calendar. When the roll notice arrives, there is often nothing to change, and confirming is a single click. The rest of the week you watch it fill.
The fee
per shift filled through the clearinghouse, paid by the store. Flat. Never a percentage of wages; never charged to a worker.
to join, and nothing until a store's first week clears. Pilot stores run at no charge while the numbers are proven together.
The fee is set at about half of what a shift costs to schedule today, so the store keeps the other half: a week's fee is worth roughly two hours of manager wages, against about twice that in scheduling time. As a nonprofit standard, the fee exists to run the clearinghouse. It does not grow with what workers earn, and it is never a share of anyone's wages.
Why a clearinghouse at all
Building a week takes a general manager three to five hours, and that is before the calls that start the moment someone drops. Meanwhile millions of people who want work are not working, and stores post shifts nobody fills. A market where willing workers and unfilled shifts sit side by side is one that does not clear. The markets that clear cheaply at scale all have an institution in the middle keeping the record and settling the transaction. Scheduled labor never had one; every store already has a clearinghouse, and it is a manager and a spreadsheet.
The full argument, the mechanism's open research questions, and provenance
Joining the standard
A store joins with a calendar, an inbox, and a wall. Its workers join with a phone. Setup happens entirely by email. A short exchange of messages sets up a store, and there is nothing to install at any point. Stores are admitted one at a time while the first ones run.
Stores
Tell the clearinghouse about the store.
Positions, hour rules, and the roster — names and email addresses; a payroll export is perfect. Setup is done with you.
Enter your regular week once.
Create the store calendar, add the repeating shifts, share its private link.
Tape the code where the schedule used to hang.
Each store receives its own QR code. The wall that held a printout now holds the way in.
Workers
Scan the code at your store.
Confirm you're in. That is the whole sign-up; nothing is installed.
Or bring it to your manager.
If your store isn't on the standard yet, the fastest way in is to send them this page. Workers bring stores onto the standard as often as stores bring workers.
Then take your turn.
When your store posts a week, your turn comes by email. Take the shifts you want. Your record starts with the first one you work.
Not a new idea. A method most workers have never been offered.
Ordering shift access by earned standing is one of the oldest and best-established scheduling methods there is. Airlines have bid crew schedules by seniority for decades; hospitals, transit agencies, public safety, and manufacturing do the same. Where it is in place it is valued for the obvious reason: the rules are known in advance and nobody has to ask for a favor.
It is also almost entirely confined to workplaces with a contract, because seniority scheduling has historically required someone to define the list and defend it. Outside those workplaces, few hourly workers have any scheduling method that is transparent from the manager to the crew. POWER generalizes the method: verified work defines the list, so no contract is needed for the order to exist.
Two changes to how it usually works
The list verifies itself. Traditional seniority is a date on a roster, defined by contract and defended through a grievance process. Here, standing is built from work that was accepted, performed, and reconciled against payroll. Neither side can move it by assertion.
Standing persists, and it is more than tenure. The oldest complaint about seniority, from workers, is that a break in employment costs you everything you built. Standing here accrues on separate dimensions: time at a place, time in a role, and, as the standard matures, time with a verified skill. Role standing persists beyond any one employer rather than resetting; time at a place stays local. Standing also decays when work stops, so a position at the front is held by working, not by having arrived early. That is the answer to the known objection that seniority entrenches whoever got there first, and it is the part of this that is genuinely new.
None of this is specific to restaurants or retail. The standard matches people to time slots in an order earned by what they have done before, so it fits anywhere time is offered to a group and taken up by some of them.
What to expect, and where the edges are
Stated before the first week rather than discovered during it.
The calendar is read, not watched.
The clearinghouse checks a store\'s calendar every few minutes, but Google can take an hour or more to show a change to anyone but its owner. The confirmation email is what counts.
Four weeks ahead is the rhythm.
Workers take turns over a week, the schedule settles for a week, then everyone has two weeks\' notice. Because a store\'s regular week repeats, four weeks ahead mostly means confirming an email. Because workers chose their own shifts, far less changes after the week is posted than under a schedule that was assigned to them.
Some shifts come back to the store.
When everyone eligible is at their limit or unavailable, the shift is the manager\'s to cover, known three weeks out. The first version has no automatic assignment.
Standing is built by working, and it fades when work stops.
Time at a store and time in a role accumulate as shifts are worked and settled, and both fade over a few years if work stops, so a place near the front is held by working rather than by having arrived first. The record itself is permanent; what decays is what a past shift is currently worth in line order.
The record is reconciled, not asserted.
Acceptance is written by the clearinghouse; hours worked come from your payroll. Each week the two are compared, and anything that disagrees is shown to both the store and the worker. Neither side can edit the other\'s record.
What comes next
The first version does the core thing completely. So you can plan around it, here is what follows.
- Automatic assignment. Today, shifts nobody claims come back to the store three weeks out. Assignment by earned standing arrives after the first stores have run.
- A same-day market. A drop inside the final two weeks reopens the shift and notifies the store at once; coverage for a call-out this morning is still handled as it is today.
- Text messages. Email carries everything until texting is registered with carriers.
Two things will not change: there is no app, by design, and the clearinghouse does not run timekeeping, payroll, or compliance filing. Your existing tools keep those jobs.
Who holds the standard
POWER Clearinghouse is the neutral institution that holds the standard and the record. It is governed as a nonprofit so that the fee funds the clearinghouse rather than an owner, and it is being structured so that no operator, employer, or platform can hold a worker's record hostage to a commercial interest. The patent assignment that completes that structure is in progress, and we will say plainly when it is done.
"When Crew was acquired, we lost our chat and our employee recognition. We had to re-upload everything, learn a new system, and bend it to work for what we needed — it wasn't made for work."
Multi-unit franchisee
That is the ordinary risk of building on a vendor: the tool is sold, and the record built inside it goes with it. The structure being built here is meant to remove that risk permanently, by putting the standard and the patent with the nonprofit and the record with the worker who earned it. Until the assignment completes, that is a commitment rather than a fact.
Rahkeem Morris, founder and president, held thirteen hourly jobs before Cornell and Harvard Business School, wrote the 2017 MIT paper that argued for this institution, and built HourWork past ten thousand hourly workplaces.
The protocol, its open research questions, and full provenance
Where the standard goes
None of what follows exists yet. It is the direction the standard is built to go.
Finer units of work
Today the unit is a shift, because a shift is the smallest thing a manager can afford to schedule by hand. When clearing costs almost nothing, the unit can be smaller: a station, a task, a delivery run. The standard is designed so that a smaller unit changes the resolution and not the mechanism.
Standing that means more than time
Standing accrues today from time at a place and time in a role. A third dimension, verified skill, is designed into the standard and waits on a way to verify skill that does not depend on anyone's opinion.
A record a worker can present
A worker's record persists beyond any one employer. The next step is making it presentable: a verified account of hours worked and roles held that a worker can show to an employer who is not yet on the standard. Most hourly workers have never had a résumé that an employer could check.
More than one clearinghouse
A standard with one operator is a product. The direction is several: scheduling platforms, payroll systems, and independent operators clearing on the same standard, so that a worker's record is recognized wherever they go. That is the point of putting the standard outside any company, including the one building it.