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3 Chapter 1 Unpredictability and Unequal Control in a Web of Time Because life is routinely unpredictable, our control over time becomes a crucial resource for keeping a job and having a family—but control over time, much like income, is contested and powerfully shaped by gender and class inequalities. Those inequalities reverberate through a “web of time” in which our daily schedules are connected to the schedules of others , especially our employers, our coworkers, and our family members. Take one example of a reverberating event that is both inevitable and unexpected: your child gets sick. All seemed well at bedtime, but at 5:00 AM your child is feverish and throwing up. It’s an important day at work, so what is to be done? Consider the responses of the people we interviewed for this book: a male surgeon (earning $360,000 a year), a woman nurse (earning $70,000), a male firefighter who is an emergency medical technician (EMT) ($47,000), and a woman certified nursing assistant (CNA) ($16,000). Although a child’s sickness could happen to any of them, the control they had, the ways they responded, and the people they can rely on were very different, with class and gender organizing those differences . The surgeon, who performed elective surgeries, had access to the operating room (OR) only one day a week, and he had operations scheduled on a day when his child got sick. Although married to another surgeon, his wife worked only half-time, so there was a two-out-of-five chance she would be home for the day and could care for their sick kid. If it happend on a day when they both worked, the nanny would have taken care of their child; after all, that was why they had a nanny. In fact, the problem they worried about was not so much a sick child as a sick nanny. As the surgeon told us: 4 Unequal Time That’s the biggest problem of all, because if the nanny calls on Wednesday, calls Wednesday morning, God forbid, and says (in a hoarse voice) “I’m sick, I can’t come in.” . . . Now, we both operate on Wednesdays—you know, what do you do on those days? And that’s really hard, and we have some of our neighbors who have kids who sometimes we can call and say, “Can you do . . . ?” But if our kid is sick and the nanny’s sick, we don’t want to pawn our sick kid off on somebody else, so sometimes we have to call and cancel the day in the OR to accommodate that. So the kids really throw a monkey wrench into the whole schedule. Later in the interview, he explained that he himself had never canceled a day in the operating room, but his wife had. The child of the firefighter EMT, who was a paramedic, got sick in early December, a particularly bad time: from hunting season to the end of the year, his coworkers took their remaining sick days, so it was hard to keep the station staffed. Normally, the captain tries to get someone else to come in. If he can’t find anyone, the captain mandates that an already on-duty EMT stay for another five-hour half-shift. The EMT didn’t want to be the reason someone else was mandated, but he was confident that if the person mandated faced a serious problem taking the extra shift, then another coworker would volunteer to take the five hours. Sometimes the firefighter ’s wife would stay home if their child was sick, but as likely as not, he would. The EMT explained that if a child gets sick, “of course that’s a reason to stay home.” Under the union contract, staying home with a sick child was a legitimate use of sick days, and he didn’t worry about being penalized. The nurse’s child got sick on a school vacation day, which meant that the unit was already short-staffed. If she called out and the hospital couldn’t find a replacement, the nurses on the floor would be stressed and might be less willing to swap the next time she needed help. But for the nurse, the first point was that a sick child was her responsibility, even though she earned more than her husband. Asking her husband to stay home didn’t occur to her. She explained that nurses don’t want to call...

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