Unequal Time Clawson, Dan; Gerstel, Naomi
07/2014
eBook
Life is unpredictable. Control over one's time is a crucial resource for managing that unpredictability, keeping a job, and raising a family. But the ability to control one's time, much like one's ...income, is determined to a significant degree by both gender and class. InUnequal Time, sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace, shaping employees' capacities to determine both their work schedules and home lives, and exacerbating differences between men and women, and the economically privileged and disadvantaged.
Unequal Timeinvestigates the interconnected schedules of four occupations in the health sector-professional-class doctors and nurses, and working-class EMTs and nursing assistants. While doctors and EMTs are predominantly men, nurses and nursing assistants are overwhelmingly women. In all four occupations, workers routinely confront schedule uncertainty, or unexpected events that interrupt, reduce, or extend work hours. Yet, Clawson and Gerstel show that members of these four occupations experience the effects of schedule uncertainty in very distinct ways, depending on both gender and class. But doctors, who are professional-class and largely male, have significant control over their schedules and tend to work long hours because they earn respect from their peers for doing so. By contrast, nursing assistants, who are primarily female and working-class, work demanding hours because they are most likely to be penalized for taking time off, no matter how valid the reasons.
Unequal Timealso shows that the degree of control that workers hold over their schedules can either reinforce or challenge conventional gender roles. Male doctors frequently work overtime and rely heavily on their wives and domestic workers to care for their families. Female nurses are more likely to handle the bulk of their family responsibilities, and use the control they have over their work schedules in order to dedicate more time to home life. Surprisingly, Clawson and Gerstel find that in the working class occupations, workers frequently undermine traditional gender roles, with male EMTs taking significant time from work for child care and women nursing assistants working extra hours to financially support their children and other relatives. Employers often underscore these disparities by allowing their upper-tier workers (doctors and nurses) the flexibility that enables their gender roles at home, including, for example, reshaping their workplaces in order to accommodate female nurses' family obligations. Low-wage workers, on the other hand, are pressured to put their jobs before the unpredictable events they might face outside of work.
Though we tend to consider personal and work scheduling an individual affair, Clawson and Gerstel present a provocative new case that time in the workplace also collective. A valuable resource for workers' advocates and policymakers alike,Unequal Timeexposes how social inequalities reverberate through a web of interconnected professional relationships and schedules, significantly shaping the lives of workers and their families.
An extensive and long-standing literature examines the amount of time people spend on their jobs and families. A newer literature, including this review, takes that older literature as background and ...focuses on the social processes that shape our schedules: how we manage our time, accepting, negotiating, or contesting our shifting obligations and commitments. Research shows that time management is increasingly complex because unpredictable schedules are pervasive, and that gender, class, and race inequalities influence our ability to manage and control them. That lack of control and the unpredictability that accompanies it not only affect individual workers but also spread. A change in one person's schedule reverberates across a set of linked others in what we call a web of time. This review surveys and integrates research on hours and schedules of both jobs and families and concludes with attention to the policies that seek to address these issues.
The articles above bring welcome attention to a key issue - possibly the key issue facing us today: left political responses to "globalization." Bonacich, Armbruster, and Nash each advance our ...understanding and indicate directions for future work. What strikes me, however, is how far we have to go, both as a movement and as theorists. In material terms capital is eons ahead of labor in establishing international ties. As a Marxist I believe that theory develops in symbiosis with practice; predictably, therefore, our limited material practice is associated with underdeveloped theory . As these pieces demonstrate, we have specific sharp insights, case studies, and examples of ideas that need to be part of a general theory, but such a theory doesn't exist even for us, academic members of a section that provides the most promising theoretical base for developing a theory of international labor solidarity. It certainly does not exist in the consciousness of rank and file workers.
Labor in the Time of Trump Kerrissey, Jasmine; Weinbaum, Eve; Hammonds, Clare ...
2020, 2020-05-21, 2020-01-15
eBook
Labor in the Time of Trump critically analyzes theright-wing attack on workers and unions and offers strategies to build a working–class movement. WhilePresidentTrump's election in 2016 may have been ...a wakeup call for labor and the Left, the underlying processes behind this shift to the righthavebeen building for at least forty years. The contributors show that only by analyzing the vulnerabilities in the right-wing strategy can the labor movement develop an effective response. Essays in the volumeexaminethe conservative upsurge, explore key challenges the labor movement faces today, and draw lessons from recent activist successes. Contributors: Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest; Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided; Shannon Gleeson, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Sarah Jaffe, co- host of Dissent Magazine 's Belabored podcast; Cedric Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago; Jennifer Klein, Yale University; Gordon Lafer, University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center; Jose La Luz, labor activist and public intellectual; Nancy MacLean, Duke University; MaryBe McMillan, President of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO; Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Lara Skinner, The Worker Institute at Cornell University; Kyla Walters, Sonoma State University
Buying Time CROCKER, Jillian; CLAWSON, Dan
Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.),
11/2012, Letnik:
59, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
As products of negotiations, union contracts provide insight into areas of stress concerning work hours and schedules. Our analysis demonstrates the ways workers in two occupations—nurses and ...firefighters—use collective bargaining to develop workplace policies that enable them to manage jobs and family. The contracts show significant differences between firefighters and nurses over issues of work scheduling, overtime, and vacations. These differences reflect nurses' concern with putting boundaries on their work lives in favor of caregiving and firefighters' concern with breadwinning. Nurse contracts specify scheduling rules in detail, heavily restrict mandatory overtime, and outline guidelines for distributing prime time vacations. Firefighter contracts, by contrast, downplay the substance of scheduling processes in favor of emphasizing fairness among firefighters in the context of restrictive weekly schedules and equal access to overtime opportunities. Findings suggest not only that union contracts are an important tool with which workers manage the competing demands of work and family, but that the manner and extent to which such negotiations happen are shaped by gendered occupation.
Using a survey, interviews, and observations, the authors examine inequality in temporal flexibility at home and at work. They focus on four occupations to show that class advantage is deployed in ...the service of gendered notions of temporal flexibility while class disadvantage makes it difficult to obtain such flexibility. The class advantage of female nurses and male doctors enables them to obtain flexibility in their work hours; they use that flexibility in gendered ways: nurses to prioritize family and physicians to prioritize careers. Female nursing assistants and male emergency medical technicians can obtain little employee-based flexibility and, as a result, have more difficulty meeting conventional gendered expectations. Advantaged occupations "do gender" in conventional ways while disadvantaged occupations "undo gender." These processes operate through organizational rules and cultural schemas that sustain one another but may undermine the gender and class neutrality of family-friendly policies.
For many years, US trade unions declined in union density, organizing capacity, level of strike activity, and political effectiveness. Labor's decline is variously attributed to demographic factors, ...inaction by unions themselves, the state and legal system, globalization, neoliberalism, and the employer offensive that ended a labor-capital accord. The AFL-CIO New Voice leadership elected in 1995, headed by John Sweeney, seeks to reverse these trends and transform the labor movement. Innovative organizing, emphasizing the use of rank-and-file intensive tactics, substantially increases union success; variants include union building, immigrant organizing, feminist approaches, and industry-wide non-National Labor Relations Board (or nonboard) organizing. The labor movement must also deal with participatory management or employee involvement programs, while experimenting with new forms, including occupational unionism, community organizing, and strengthened alliances with other social movements.
In 2004, Michael Burawoy, speaking as president of the American Sociological Association, generated far-reaching controversy when he issued an ambitious and impassioned call for a "public sociology." ...Burawoy argued that sociology should speak beyond the university, engaging with social movements and deepening an understanding of the historical and social context in which they exist. In this volume, renowned sociologists come together to debate the perils and the potentials of Burawoy's challenge.
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