>I remembered your saying that the manager at the bar gave you a regular schedule, so you were able to take classes. It appears that, at least, once you were taking a course, the bar accommodated to your class schedule for that semester. I hear that a lot of food service workers today can't get that kind of regularity, and it's making it really hard for them to arrange childcare, let alone go to school.

From what I hear from my son-in-law, now in most places they hire you (he was in a car repair and parts retail) on per-hour basis, but there's no guarantee that you'll have any number of hours. They simply call you when they need you. You can't get another job during that time, because if you're not there they'll just get you off the call list (or for no reason at all). It even happened that they did call him on a saturday when he was supposed to be off, he took 30 minutes to cancel everything and drive there - only to hear that sorry, we thought we had a rush but it cleared in minutes. They didn't even call to cancel. His weekly hours could be anywhere between 6 and 22. And that's still called having a job.