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Chapter 4: Setting the Official Schedule
- Russell Sage Foundation
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59 Chapter 4 Setting the Official Schedule When they are hired, regular staff members are typically given an official basic schedule that specifies in advance a number of work hours and a shift—day, evening, and/or night; weekday or weekend—that both they and their employer come to expect. These official schedules are disrupted much of the time, but in this chapter we begin by examining the framework within which those disruptions occur. After introducing the official schedule, we argue that its development is shaped by four processes, all of which create inequalities. First, across the four occupations, management sets staffing ratios that provide the frame within which official schedules take shape; this control often becomes invisible as the distribution of shifts and schedules seems to take on a life of its own. Second, class matters. Eviatar Zerubavel highlighted the importance of egalitarian principles and fairness “as a fundamental rule of scheduling” within occupational groups.1 We show, however, that principles of scheduling are also unequally distributed across groups. For the two professional occupations, employers make efforts (for doctors a lot, for nurses somewhat less) to adapt schedules to what employees want and to give them some degree of control over when they work. These two advantaged occupations have also developed structural staffing alternatives that provide personnel to fill the designated slots that regular staff resist or reject. These alternatives become components of a web of time and offer the advantaged some control over their schedules. For the two working-class occupations, employers generally impose a rigid official schedule and expect employees to conform to it. For these occupations, we see fewer alternative staffing systems to fill in schedule holes. Third, gender matters. In large part gender inequality in official schedules is organized around family and becomes a key part of the web of time—in very different ways for women and men. To a significant extent occupations gendered male make paid work a priority (men in these oc- 60 Unequal Time cupations tend to believe breadwinning remains their primary family responsibility ) and often are officially organized so that workers will structure the rest of their lives, including their families, around the job schedule. In contrast, occupations gendered female sometimes recognize that even official basic schedules may have to accommodate family work. Fourth, class and gender jointly shape official basic schedules and the priority of work and family. In professions dominated by men, employees often use their control to expand their work time; in professions dominated by women, employees often use their control to convince employers to adapt even their official work schedules to their lives outside of work, especially their domestic responsibilities. That is, workers themselves use class advantage in the service of “doing gender.”2 In contrast, the two working-class occupations—especially female nursing assistants and to some extent EMTs—have little ability to shape or control their basic work schedule. For both EMTs and nursing assistants, being in a disadvantaged class position makes it more difficult to enact traditional or conventional gender models than it is for the professionals. All too often this intersection has been overlooked in studies of time, which sometimes document the separate effects of gender and class but rarely their joint operation. FRAMING THE SCHEDULE: MANAGERIAL PREROGATIVE Who and what shapes the basic official schedule, and how many staff members are needed to fill it? Especially for health care organizations, the overriding scheduling challenge is developing a plan to provide continuous coverage twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We might expect that the number of staff members needed to provide safe, around-the-clock care would be set by empirical research and guided by legal mandate—just as it is for, say, some day care providers or flight attendants. By and large, however, this is not the case in health care. Instead , management personnel decide what staff ratios they think are necessary and then shape their basic official schedules around these organizational decisions. Their constructions of staff ratios do not derive from any set of best practices based in research or from legal regulations that set staffing ratios, except insofar as there is a legally enforced “duty of care.” De facto staffing patterns result instead from managerial prerogative based largely on what managers assert are budget constraints (especially federal and insurance company reimbursement rates), the staffing necessary to meet what they see as safety and quality concerns, and the norms [3.81.222.152...