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181 Chapter 9 Unequal Families: Class Shapes Men’s Responses to Unpredictability An examination of emergency medical technicians and doctors—the two occupations dominated by men—suggests a process parallel to that for nursing assistants and nurses: those with class advantage promote gender conventions, while those with less class advantage “undo gender .” That is, professional men “do” gender convention and workingclass men undo it. Cecilia Ridgeway argues: “The rigid structure of work time that the traditional workweek involves implicitly assumes that ideal workers cannot have direct responsibility for the daily care of dependent children.”1 In our study that aptly describes one group and only one group—the male physicians. They look very different not only from the low-wage CNAs and professional women nurses but also from the working-class male EMTs. The EMTs revise their schedules, especially their overtime and second jobs, in the name of family in ways that doctors do not. EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHNICIANS EMTs work long hours and rigid basic schedules, but they also try to organize their time around caregiving for their families—and in doing so they revise standard notions of masculinity. Certainly the firefighters, and often the private-sector EMTs, have very little control over their basic official schedules. And across organizations, EMTs work substantial overtime and, more than any other occupation, put in time at second jobs. For overtime and second job hours, however, most EMTs try to pick up only those hours and shifts that allow them to take unpredictable time off to take care of sick family members or attend special events, intermittent time off to 182 Unequal Time run household errands, special time to just enjoy their wives and children, and more routine time for regular parenting activities.2 For working-class EMTs, these family roles entail a reversal of what both the popular press and academic research suggest is conventionally expected of men (probably in part because neither looks very often at working-class men). In stark contrast to nurses, EMTs’ involvement in family, especially fathering , entails a kind of resistance to the normative family—to the conventional “ideal male worker” who turns out to be a professional man.3 Although they usually could not alter the official basic schedules that were handed out months in advance, the male EMTs in our study talked not only about refusing callbacks and overtime but also about leaving early or arriving a little late because of family responsibilities.4 Without hesitation, one EMT described how he and his wife had divided their schedules: Like when my wife—when we first had Sara [their daughter], my schedule needed to match hers. It was so I could be off when she was on and needed to be on when she was off—so I did. That was a major schedule change for the family. [I] modified my schedule to accommodate the family. The EMTs talked of picking children up from school, feeding them dinner , or staying home with them when they got sick. The EMTs saw this work as their responsibility—shared with their wives. One described his schedule: “My son’s out of school at 2:30 in the afternoon. That means that I have to leave here about 2:15 to make sure I’m at the school to pick him up.” Another described his willingness to take callbacks: “When my daughters are in school, I come in a lot during the day. Weekends, that’s a rarity unless it is late at night or early in the morning. I’ll come in from midnight on.” Or as another explained the general pattern: “The reason that for the most part scheduling gets changed around and stuff, it’s, it’s, 98 percent of the time it has to do with the kids.” Especially when their children got sick, many of the EMT fathers took it for granted that “of course that’s a reason to stay home.” These working-class men produced schedule unpredictability in response to what they saw as their children’s needs. It was not always easy for these EMT fathers to change their hours when they felt that they were needed at home. One emphasized that by prioritizing his family, he might, under some conditions, be forced to accept penalties at work: “If there was a family emergency, the good thing about where we work, I’d leave. . . . So I would get up and leave, because it’s family and friends first. I have no problem...

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