Work Time: Conflict, Control, and Change by Cynthia L. Negrey (review)

As an organizing principle, time exerts a very real influence on our lives. The way time is experienced, particularly work time, has changed radically over the course of history. The causes and consequences of this change is the focus of Cynthia Negrey’s Work Time: Conflict, Control, and Change. Over the course of the book, Negrey effectively highlights the socially constructed nature of work time, demonstrating the ways economic and cultural factors combine with public policy and organizational cultures to create the current work time realities. Throughout the book, Negrey is attentive to the way gender operates to shape the experience of work time differently for men and women, providing an additional layer of analysis to her solid overview of the work time literature.

In Chapter 1, Negrey constructs a rich historical narrative about the changing contours of work time, beginning with hunter-gather societies, demonstrating how work time was largely shaped by the seasons, forces of nature, and a gendered division of labour. Similar seasonal and agrarian rhythms shaped work time into the medieval period, as much of Europe remained engaged in agriculture. As more workers began selling their labour for wages, the measurement of time took on new significance. More exact measures of time were aided in no small part by the invention of the mechanical clock, which Negrey positions as equal in significance to the printing press. Moving through the Industrial Revolution, Negrey draws attention to the way the clock shifts the work of many away from a task orientation to a time orientation. The manufacturing and service work that dominated the 20th and 21st centuries kept labour oriented towards time, but task-oriented work has regained significance as knowledge work becomes an increasingly important part of the global economy.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the factors that lead to the establishment of the 40-hour work week. As Negrey demonstrates, this particular configuration of the standard workweek – eight hours a day, five days a week, Monday through Friday – was the product of many hard fought battles. Workers desired meaningful time outside of work for pursuits of their choosing, such as political activities, leisure, and education. Worker agitation around work hour limits was also fueled by concerns around health and safety, particularly for women and children workers. The impact of the Great Depression on work hour limits is also explored, with attention paid to the legal measures taken to ease the strain of high unemployment. These measures laid the foundation for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which remains highly influential in the regulation of work time to this day. These first two chapters do much to set the stage for the remainder of the book, providing the necessary historical depth to fully understand current trends and realities around work time today.

How work time is experienced in the US today varies widely across social groups. While average work hours have remained just under 40 hours per week over the last several decades, Negrey dives deeper into the data on work hours more fully in Chapter 3. In doing so, she captures the wide range of ways Americans now work, including overtime, part time, temporary work, and contract work, and the expansion of the possible hours of the day workers are being asked to work. What the data reveal is the very real problem of overwork and underwork: many American workers now work more hours than they would like, while many others struggle with insufficient work time. The challenges of overwork and underwork play out in multiple ways for American families, to which Negrey turns to in Chapter 4.

The challenges of work/family and work/life fit are the subject of Chapter 4. One of the most dramatic social changes of the latter half of the 20th century was the influx of women into the paid labour force. This influx profoundly changed labour force dynamics, but it also changed negotiations around time that occurred in the home. While a...