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Hourly workers at U.S. restaurants want steady pay more than they want health benefits.
Instant Financial — a company that sells an electronic card that helps employers pay hourly workers quickly — has published data on hourly restaurant workers' preferences in a summary of results from a recent survey.
Only 49% of the 750 restaurant workers who participated classified "health insurance or medical benefits" as being very important.
The share of the workers who rated pay-related job features as being very important was 67% for having guaranteed minimum hours each week and 58% for having paid time off.
Workers also hinted at their relatively low level of interest in health benefits in answers to a question about what bills they were most likely to delay or avoid paying to cope with a big, unexpected expense.
The share of workers with an expense who identified that expense as a top cost-cutting target was just 26% for housing expenses, 30% for car insurance premiums and 31.5% for utilities.
About 38% of the workers who were paying for health insurance said they were most likely to stop paying their share of the health insurance premiums.
Some of the job features or benefits that ranked lower were retirement benefits, transportation benefits and child care benefits.
What it means: Policymakers may have been putting too much emphasis on access to rich health benefits for the lowest-wage workers and too little on their need for enough income to meet basic housing and transportation needs.
The survey: Instant Financial hired an outside survey firm to conduct the survey.
The sample included people ages 16 to 65 all around the United States.
The backdrop: Instant Financial and other "earned wage access" firms help workers get immediate access to their paychecks, without using traditional payday loans.
The nature of their market has given the firms a keen interest in the needs of the working poor.
In the restaurant and food services industries, hourly workers are "experiencing real economic pain, with many living paycheck to paycheck, skipping meals, and carrying near-constant financial stress," according to Instant Financial analysts. "They are trying to navigate these pressures through borrowing, delaying essentials, and relying on costly workarounds, all while many feel that company leadership does not fully understand what it means to live under this level of strain."
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