Unequal Time: Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules

Chapter 3: The Context: Occupations and Organizations

33 Chapter 3 The Context: Occupations and Organizations Much research on time decontextualizes and disconnects individual workers from one another. These studies have yielded important insights, and we sometimes rely on them. But for our purposes, even these studies are limited: they cannot and do not provide a systemic view of the web of time, that is, of the ways time is a collective experience. These studies almost never embed workers in both shared occupations and organizations. Unless research embeds occupations in organizations, it is difficult to see the ways that time is layered, negotiated, contested, and shaped by unequal relations. This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the four occupations and eight organizations we studied. For expository reasons, this chapter is divided in two—the first half covers the occupational context, and the second half the organizational context—though we argue that it is difficult to fully separate the two. OCCUPATIONS: CHARACTERISTICS, TASKS, INTENSITY, AND RELATIONS In discussing each occupation, we focus on four aspects: the basic demography of the group, the allocation of tasks (a division sometimes legally mandated, sometimes dictated by management, and sometimes worked out among coworkers), the intensity of work routines, and the attendant hierarchies and social relations. Here we devote relatively little attention to the unpredictability of hours and the degree of control over work and scheduling in each occupation, as this is a central concern of the rest of the book. Looking across occupations, we see that even though the tasks, intensity , and social relations at work are quite distinct, at least analytically, 34 Unequal Time from the hours of work, they also clearly shape the experience of those hours. Emergency Medical Technicians EMTs have three levels of certification—basic (81 percent of all EMTs), intermediate (3 percent), and paramedic (16 percent). Although more than 80 percent of EMTs are certified at the basic level, only 46 percent of employed EMTs are at the basic level.1 Our survey and interviews reflect data for employed EMTs. There is a major pay difference between basic EMTs and paramedics, with paramedics earning almost twice what basic EMTs earn.2 Both in our area and nationally, much of the EMT service is provided by town and city firefighters.3 The typical emergency medical system (EMS) worker—both in our study and nationwide—is a young white male, and the job entails, at least part of the time, the expression of a kind of heroic masculinity.4 The nature of the calls is similar, whether they work for a fire department or in the private sector; EMTs in our study talked about the attraction of the work and its pull on them: Am I going to get lucky tonight?. . . It’s all about trauma codes, so the shootings , the stabbings, the bad car accidents—I want to be there for that. So that’s the trade-off: I’ll have these people treat me like crap, whether it’s the patient or the family or the nursing staff or whoever. But the trade-off is, I might get a trauma code. I might get a shooting tonight, so it’s worth it for that one call, that one good call. And I have to be honest, that one good call— and I’m not talking about the nature of the call, but the call where you see yourself making a difference—it is so worth it. And that I think is what has you come back. Consider two calls that involved response by the same team of paramedics , each for a reported heart attack. In one, a forty-year-old white woman called self-reporting that she was having a heart attack. Taking a history on scene revealed that she had frequent anxiety attacks, that she was on medication for them, and that she had failed to take her medication that day; other signs indicated normal heart functioning combined with rapid breathing (forty-five times per minute, compared to a normal rate of ten to twelve), an indicator of an anxiety attack. The woman was taken to the hospital, but transported by basic-level EMTs rather than by paramedics. In the other case, by good luck the paramedic team arrived at the scene just two minutes after a call for a man having a massive heart attack. They The Context 35 found the man to be clinically dead: no pulse, no breathing. Within about sixty...