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Chapter 11: The Push of the Family and the Pull of the Job
- Russell Sage Foundation
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235 235 Chapter 11 The Push of the Family and the Pull of the Job Many say that the family is a haven in a heartless world—and it is the job that is the heartless world. This chapter reverses that understanding. Here we show the ways in which workers often use the metaphor of “family ” to describe the relationships they develop at work at the same time as they reject the view that their own family is a haven or an escape from the job. Paid work becomes the escape, and family the source of stress. As a result, workers sometimes seek extra hours on the job and do not always want to take full advantage of “family-friendly” work policies. Corporate managers and executives also use the language of “family” to describe the workplace; they use it to draw in workers, boost the bottom line, and control work hours. For example, the president and CEO of Walmart recently said at a shareholders’ meeting: “The fact is we aren’t just associates and customers in our stores. We’re people who grew up together, worship together, and live on the same streets. . . . At Walmart, we are family.”1 McDonald’s presents itself as “a family” where “happy time is family time” and its executive center is a “home office.” It is not just those corporations serving the less affluent that sell themselves as family. Explaining the success of her upscale clothing company in an interview , Eileen Fisher said, “I think it comes out of a family model.”2 Larry Page, cofounder and chief executive of Google, remarked: “It’s important that the company be a family, that people feel that they’re part of the company , and that the company is like a family to them.”3 George Lakoff defines metaphor as “understanding one kind of thing or experience in terms of another”; thus understood, the use of metaphor “not only helps make sense of activities but also structures them.”4 The metaphor of family helps shape expectations, actions, and relationships in the workplace. For workers to conceptualize jobs as families depends on the conditions of their families and the conditions of their jobs, both of which vary 236 Unequal Time by gender and class. It was the relatively disadvantaged women workers, the CNAs, who were most likely to speak of their relations at work as “family”; they did so more than members of any of the other groups, whether the two groups of professionals or the male working-class EMTs. Not only were the low-wage women caregivers more likely to talk of their relations at work (or at least some of those relations) as family, but they were also more likely to think of these work relations as an escape from home. This may seem a paradox. As we have seen, nursing assistants often work under difficult conditions—not only do they earn low wages, but their jobs entail intense activity, frequent injuries, unpredictable hours, and little authority or control over their tasks or schedules. Even though nursing assistants recognized, sometimes complained about, and sometimes protested these job conditions, we will show here that they also turned those very jobs into “family”—finding attachment and connection with both coworkers and patients (or “residents,” as they are called in some nursing “homes”).5 We argue that this seeming paradox can be explained at least in part by the recursive relationship between paid work and family. That is, jobs with unpredictable schedules that cause injury and provide few material benefits often produce stresses at home, and these tensions sometimes send workers back to the job as an escape from their homes. This chapter examines three factors that lead nursing assistants to choose work over home and to use the language of family to describe their jobs. First, the residents whom nursing assistants care for become either children or parents to them. Second, their coworkers become partners and siblings. And finally, these two attractions of work are often combined for nursing assistants with a third factor—the stress of the actual family at home, which can lead to the job becoming an escape. We conclude by showing that this combination of factors is associated with gender and class: nursing assistants’ experience of work as family does not apply, or applies with diminished force, to the other occupations we studied. FAMILY: HAVEN IN A HEARTLESS WORLD? Perhaps the most common popular and academic understanding of the family is as a haven...