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211 Chapter 10 Finding Solutions in the Web of Time: Coworkers The web of time, which often creates unpredictability and causes schedule problems, can also provide the solutions to these problems and turn what might have been a major difficulty into a minor complication. With help from coworkers, people can take a sick day without being charged with one, and they can get vacation days or an extra shift at times that the scheduler says are not available. By swapping hours and schedules with one another, employees themselves, not the managers, take charge of a key aspect of scheduling decisions and solve the toughest problems, the ones that managers cannot or will not solve. Initiated by employees to serve their own purposes, these problem-solving actions provide highly valued employee control over crucial scheduling challenges. Coworkerinitiated scheduling of this sort is unequivocally a win for workers. In many ways this form of employee control is also a win for managers, who set the parameters for what is acceptable and who also benefit when workers solve what would otherwise be tough problems. In one respect, however, coworker schedule swaps are not a win for management. A prevailing theme in labor history, labor studies, and sociology generally is that those with power maintain their control in part by creating or exacerbating divisions among workers, divisions often based on race or gender. Some employers seek to have employees identify with the employer (think the Walmart cheer) and to eliminate practices that create solidarity among them. Nevertheless, employees often identify primarily with their coworkers, who may rely on one another to develop a joint critique of the organization’s rules and policies and to protect one another from the negative effects of punitive policies.1 The practice of switching work hours with coworkers is a case in point: it sometimes increases resentment of management and almost always provides both a reason to get to know coworkers and a material underpinning to their solidarity. 212 Unequal Time The practice of swapping hours as a way to gain control over unpredictability differs by class and gender, but it happens to a significant degree in every occupation. Our survey shows how widespread the practice is and how it varies from one occupation to another. In every occupation, a large majority of workers used schedule swaps: 93 percent of EMTs, 88 percent of physicians, 83 percent of nursing assistants, and 72 percent of nurses. As these figures show, while just about everyone swapped, men were more likely than women to swap, and those in working-class jobs were more likely to do so than professionals. Nurses were the least likely to swap—but even so, more than two out of three sometimes did so. Across all four occupations, coworkers were both a source of emotional and practical support (or stress) and a central resource in managing the web of time, but the challenges that workers faced, the relations they formed, and the swaps these produced differed by class and gender. The two working-class occupations, nursing assistants and EMTs, faced rigid schedules; swapping with coworkers was a vital way to gain some control over what was otherwise fixed and unalterable. This control was especially important for nursing assistants, who frequently needed a way to escape the punitive consequences of their employer’s sick leave policies. The two professional occupations, nurses and doctors, were better able to shape their official basic schedules, so although they also relied on coworkers , being able to switch with coworkers was only one of several means of addressing a scheduling problem at their disposal. The two male-dominated occupations, doctors and EMTs, were not constrained by overtime laws—the doctors because they were exempt from the laws, and EMTs because many of them were public-sector workers (with somewhat more flexible rules) and almost all were already working overtime. Moreover, although taking care of children was a responsibility that many male EMTs accepted, women were more likely than men to be responsible for family matters. Family was both a reason women wanted to switch schedules and a constraint making it difficult to do so. But for women too, swapping schedules was subject to the intersection of gender and class: nurses, who swapped the least of any group, had class advantage but were also laboring under the familial constraints associated with womanhood. They were able to gain a significant degree of control over their work schedules and often had the financial wherewithal to use that...

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