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261 Chapter 12 Inequality and the Normal Unpredictability of Time Conventional wisdom holds that work policies about time are too rigid. This book shows that for many Americans the problem with work policies is too much flexibility as often as it is too much rigidity. Not only do supposedly “flexible” work policies often force employees to adapt to unpredictability , but these policies are unequally distributed, as are the stresses they produce. Inequalities of power organized around gender and class shape how time and normal unpredictability play out—who controls time and who pays the costs. Control over time is negotiated and contested, in ways both direct and hidden, between workers and employers, between husbands and wives and other relatives, and among coworkers. Together all these actors create a web of time—pushing and pulling, supporting, substituting for, or struggling as they try to get the time to do what they want or need to do. The struggle over time does not simply occur at the point when someone is hired and the official basic schedule is set (although it does sometimes occur there). It is far more ubiquitous, involving an ongoing set of conflicts, strategies, and negotiations about the daily, weekly, and yearly events that are not predicted at the moment of hiring: Will you work extra (and under what conditions)? Will you stay home for a child with a bad cold? For one with pneumonia? For a mother-in-law who moved in with you because she just lost her husband? If you need to stay extra hours at work, will you be compensated for that, and how much? These decisions shape the micropolitics of the labor process. Literature on the labor process focuses, for the most part, on skill, autonomy, and money. This book analyzes time and who controls it. After all, what labor sells is first and foremost time. Unpredictability in hours and schedules is not just pervasive and is not 262 Unequal Time simply a fact of nature; there is good reason to believe (even if we do not have good historical data supporting this view) that unpredictability has grown over the last few decades. Part of the growth in temporal unpredictability is tied to macro changes in the economic system and labor market . Committed to precarious employment, increasingly organizations are lean-staffed and hire temporary or contingent workers to fill some of the holes created by their lean staffing. Occupations that demand night and weekend hours are growing. New technologies add to the sway of unpredictability . Alongside such economic changes, broad-based trends in the family have made normal unpredictability more common. More women are in the labor force, many as part of dual-earner couples, and are thus less able to cover for the unpredictability that routinely occurs at their husbands’ jobs. Increasing numbers of adult children are moving back home, disrupting their parents’ routines. With delayed marriage, the high rates of divorce, and the increase in babies born outside of marriage, many more people are single parents, especially single mothers, who must cope with unexpected events; often single parents rely on extended kin, whose own lives then become less predictable. These related trends in both the economy and the family create events that are predictable in the aggregate but unpredictable from the perspective of the individuals coping with them. Without understanding the social or collective character of these larger conditions, people who encounter them come to think that something is wrong with them personally. They often think that it is their own fault that they struggle to manage their crazy schedules. Focusing on unpredictability and control—and the inequalities underpinning them—leads us in a direction left largely unexplored by the growing number of researchers who study work time. With a limited number of important exceptions, such studies tend to focus on whether people work and on the official listings of hours that managers or workers report on a survey for a “typical day.”1 We find that the usual categories of fulltime and part-time and even nonstandard hours—that is, the entire notion of a fixed schedule—are all problematic across a range of organizations and in both advantaged and disadvantaged occupations. When the work-family literature considers the situation of a worker needing an exception to the normally required schedule, it primarily looks at managers and supervisors, who may make special arrangements for valued workers. So, too, even as organizational sociologists explore the roles of a range of actors, they...

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