Unequal Time: Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi Preface and Acknowledgments This project began longer ago than we care to think. It began when we first thought about where our interests intersected and whether collaboration would be fruitful. Naomi’s work, with numerous collaborators, had shown that families, when confronted by what might appear to be the same problem, responded in varying ways, depending on class, gender, and race. She had a special interest in addressing the time it took to complete not only a first shift (spent in a job) and a second shift (spent in marriage , housework, and child care) but also a third shift (spent caring for extended kin) and looking at the ways in which these were related—especially how time spent in the “greedy institutions” of jobs and marriages could detract from the time spent on other matters. In related but separate work, Naomi focused on the Family and Medical Leave Act, showing that, despite what the law said, it reinforced inequality of race, class, and gender and also that employers were ignoring the law, or obeying only a portion of it. Dan had recently completed a study of the labor movement in which he argued that most of the time labor is in retreat, but in occasional (relatively brief) periods it makes dramatic gains. During those periods of upsurge, the labor movement takes up new issues, reaches out to underrepresented demographic groups, and adopts new forms of organization and new tactics . Thinking about the issues that might drive an upsurge, he thought the most likely seemed to be how workers and their families handled the time demands of jobs. For many people the problem is overwork. Those whose lives require them to be constantly available for work would like to take back the forty-hour workweek, not to mention the fading concept of evenings off and weekends free. Meanwhile, other people—almost one in seven in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics U6 unemployment rate—want to work but can’t get any job, or they can’t get enough hours in their job to pay the bills. A movement to challenge these twin re- xii Preface and Acknowledgments alities, Dan concluded, might draw widespread support and trigger new alliances and new tactics. Our interests clearly intersected, and the more we worked on the project the truer that became, to the point that we can no longer tell which of us wrote what—we very much doubt that even one page remains in the book that was written by one of us, and only one. The order of authorship is alphabetical; we contributed equally and would list our names with equal prominence were there a way to do so. We worked with many others. The project was shaped by so many people that we couldn’t hope to acknowledge them all. That’s especially the case for those whose written work and conference presentations have influenced us, even when—perhaps especially when—that work is not specifically cited here, or the citations give only a hint of the work’s impact on our thinking. We collected, coded, and analyzed more data than for any project either of us had done before. Our interviews were (mostly) transcribed by Karen Mason and Martha Stone; anytime we needed to get an interview transcribed by someone else we learned just how good they both were. They not only got what was said accurately (not always an easy task) but captured nuances of language. Several librarians helped us track down sources or brought us materials we had not known existed. We are especially indebted to Steve McGinty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and to Clare Gabriel and Katie Winograd at the Russell Sage Foundation. We also thank Galo Falchettore for research services at the Russell Sage Foundation during our visiting scholar year. Our warm thanks go to both the graduate and undergraduate students who helped create the data needed for this project. Undergraduates did so primarily by entering data, especially concerning the schedules people actually worked as opposed to those they were officially scheduled to work. These students included Dylan Barnett, Daniel Goldberg, Ming Li, Valerie Lucas, Julia Medhzitova, Denise Miller, Julia Popkin, Matt Rosenbaum, and Stephanie St. Paul. Julia also helped code union contracts. Zoe Crowley analyzed coded interviews and helped call attention to the most compelling examples. In coding interviews and union contracts, graduate students Laura Heston, Melissa Hodges, Marianne Joyce, and Mary Koppes worked hard to maintain inter-coder reliability...