Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 From Field to Factory and Beyond

Original Affluence?

Medieval Church Time, Modern Clock Time

Commodified Time

Industrial Time-discipline

Time-work Discipline in the Twenty-first Century

Gendered Time

2 Work-Time Reduction in the US

Citizenship, Leisure, Education, and Health

From Haymarket to Henry Ford

Work Sharing and Fair Labor

Two 30-hour Experiments

Conclusion

3 Current Trends

Annual Hours

Weekly Hours

Overtime

Non-standard Work

Non-standard Schedules

Hours Mismatches

4 Work–family, Work–life

From Family-based to Family Consumer Economy

Women’s Labor-force Participation

Family Structure and Employment Hours

Housework, Child Care, and Free Time

Work–family

Private Adaptations

Workplace and Public Policy Initiatives

Work–life

5 Work Time Outside the US

Work Hours in Industrialized Nations

Work Hours Regulations in Europe

Women’s Part-time Employment in Europe

Family Policies

European Couples’ Work-hour Strategies

Work Hours in Transition and Developing Countries

Work Hours Preferences

Conclusion

6 A New Political Economy of Work Time

The Electronic Cottage

Customized Time: Two Forms

Recommendations for Change

Work Time and Environmental Sustainability

Conclusion

References

Index

Copyright © Cynthia L. Negrey 2012

The right of Cynthia L. Negrey to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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Figures

3.1 Mismatches in work hours and work status by gender

5.1 Employment status by sex

5.2 Full-time workers by average weekly hours

Tables

3.1 Meta-analysis of studies of paid work hours

3.2 Percentage of men and women working long and short hours

3.3 Age and sex distribution of workers employed full time and part time

3.4 Age and sex distribution of workers in contingent and alternative arrangements

4.1 Civilian labor-force participation rates

4.2 Women’s labor-force participation by presence and age of children

4.3 Average work hours by family type, 1970–2000

4.4 Average hours per week of unpaid household work and paid work, 2003–2007

5.1 Average annual working time 2007 and 2009

5.2 Part-time employment as % of total employment 2007 and 2009

5.3 EU Directives on working time

5.4 Couples’ work arrangements by country

5.5 Weekly normal hours limits (2005)

Boxes

2.1 Time for what we will

2.2 Women and children first: the entering wedge

3.1 Medical residents’ long hours

3.2 Part-time employment in grocery stores

3.3 Being a temp

3.4 Non-standard work and welfare reform

4.1 Work and life at IBM

4.2 Managing the work–life boundary: calendars

5.1 France’s 35-hour workweek

5.2 The Netherlands

6.1 Examples of recommendations for change

Quizzical looks. Blank stares. These were common reactions, from students especially, but also from friends, family, and even a few colleagues, when, upon inquiry, I said the book I’m writing is about work time. The notion wasn’t immediately intuitive, but with a bit of explanation – history of the 40-hour workweek, growth of part-time jobs, work–family issues – they got it. Among the students, perhaps, this is just an expression of an immature work life. But, more likely, I think, these reactions are a microcosm of a society in which work time is taken for granted and not a well-developed subject of public discourse. Scratch the surface, however, and everyone has a story, or knows someone else’s story: overworked and stressed out; an undesirable work schedule; stuck in a part-time job; child-care problems; it’s better in Europe. These personal troubles are the stuff of everyday conversation. But, ordinarily, people don’t think of them more broadly and abstractly as matters of labor market structure, or even as something we might hope to change.

This book originated as a memo and a short working paper. The memo was a review more than a decade ago of an American Sociological Association collection of syllabi in the Sociology of Work in which I pondered: why don’t more instructors cover work time in their classes? Preoccupied with the next deadline, I filed the memo away to uncover it several years later while purging old files. The memo contained a list of topics on work time that, upon rediscovery, eventually led me on the path that ends here. The working paper, “A New Shorter Full-time Norm,” was written about 10 years ago when, on leave from the University of Louisville, I was a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC. IWPR member Clara G. Schiffer had a passion for work time and funded my work on the paper, which informed small portions of chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 herein. I’m grateful to Ms Schiffer and IWPR, especially Heidi Hartmann and Barbara Gault, for providing the resources and time to draft that paper.

Early on, Carmen Sirianni encouraged my budding interest in work time. Peter Meiksins reinforced it. Both commented on a synopsis of this book and reassured me of its value. Keen insights from William Finlay, Arne Kalleberg, Amy Wharton, and the anonymous reviewers helped me expand select content, refine themes, and reorganize some major ideas. At Polity, Commissioning Editor for Sociology Jonathan Skerrett pushed me analytically and imposed a word limit that challenged me to tighten details, and tighten again. It is a far better product for that discipline. I also thank Beatrice Iori and Helen Gray, production and copy editors respectively, for the attention and care they gave my manuscript.

Last, but certainly not least, I thank my family, friends, and colleagues, who respected my writing time, asked about my progress, and probably listened to more than they bargained for (!) over many years.

A displaced full-time manufacturing worker works two part-time jobs in retail, earning 50 percent less per hour than his manufacturing wage. Package handlers strike over too many part-time jobs and too few full-time opportunities at UPS. Auto workers, required to work 12- to 14-hour days, often seven days a week, go on strike over excessive hours. An Asian company acquires an American musical instrument manufacturer, lowering wages and mandating overtime. A tech worker works more than 50 hours a week as a contract employee. But he worries about job insecurity and prefers a regular, full-time job. Another contract worker likes the arrangement because of flexibility to work at home. A student works part time and plans to work full time after finishing school. A professor, who worked 50 hours a week his entire career, opts for phased retirement and cuts his work time in half for a few years before exiting the university. A temp worker re-entering the labor force after many years hopes the experience will help her get a regular, full-time job. A single mother withdraws her child from day care because it costs more than she earns, then works nights and weekends when a relative can care for her child. A part-time retail worker’s hours return to 25 after having worked 40-hour weeks during the holiday season. A parent laments that he cannot attend his children’s school events because his work schedule is inflexible. Meatpacking workers seek accommodations for break times for religious observance. Government workers can work four 10-hour days to reduce commutes when gasoline is $4.00 per gallon. Less than six months later they are required to take periodic unpaid furloughs during the 2008 budget crunch.

These are several examples of choices workers make, or have imposed on them, and ways in which they experience work time in various occupations, organizations, and industries. They are personal experiences, but each is a representation of broader organizational strategies and social issues.

In The Sociological Imagination, Mills (1959) argued that personal experiences, or private troubles, are often individual manifestations of public issues. Unemployment is a good example. Although inadequate training, education, or experience can be the cause of an individual’s inability to get a job, often unemployment stems from problems in the larger economy – overproduction by industries and companies, for example, or producers’ and consumers’ inability to obtain credit to do business and make purchases – and individuals experience job loss, financial difficulties, and personal and family stress. Many Americans today experience private troubles associated with work time: they feel overworked, have conflicts between their job and family responsibilities, have too little income and not enough work. It’s easy to blame private troubles on oneself: I work too much because I’m too dutiful – I need to “just say no”; I need to manage my time better so I can be effective at my job and less stressed at home; maybe I should get a degree so I can get a better job with better hours and pay.

An “On the Job Advice” column from The Indianapolis Star took this private troubles approach in advising readers to “[w]ork smarter, not harder” and “[s]et aside personal and family time” as professional New Year’s resolutions. The writer recommended analyzing the workday to determine where time is being used inefficiently in order to become more productive without working longer. On the personal and family side, she recommended reading a book, watching a movie and dining with one’s family, and using vacation days (Phillips 2008). This book is a meditation on these matters and more, but I depart from the private troubles approach by investigating work time as a public issue. What are recent and longer-term work-time trends? What are the historical, cultural, public policy, and business sources of our current work-time practices? How do US trends and practices compare to other nations? Once the sources of these conventions, and cross-national variations, are understood, what are the possibilities for change to better distribute work time across people, within our daily lives, and throughout our lifetimes?

I became interested in work time as a graduate student in Michigan in the early 1980s. The United States was then in the throes of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and the industrial Midwest was affected disproportionately because its economy was based on traditional manufacturing industries like automobiles, steel, and machine tools. The twin recessions of 1979 to 1982 foreshadowed structural economic difficulties that persist, particularly job loss associated with global competition and production. With double-digit unemployment in the early 1980s, I became fascinated by the notion of work-time reduction to redistribute jobs and ease unemployment. In my research, I learned that scholars, policymakers, labor activists, and other critical thinkers touted this idea in the 1930s and 1960s.

While I was curious about work time and unemployment, I became aware that part-time and temporary jobs in the US were increasing at a rate faster than full-time employment. This trend was setting up a structural condition whereby there would not be enough full-time jobs for everyone who wanted them. Some workers would be forced into and become stuck in part-time or temporary jobs. Knowing that part-time and temporary jobs generally pay less than full-time jobs, a growing percentage of the American workforce would be condemned to working poverty.

Yet there was another factor in this complex web of work time. Some workers, especially women, want part-time jobs to integrate employment and family care. Since the 1980s, other forms of employment have emerged to help parents reconcile jobs with family life, such as job sharing, compressed workweeks, and flexible scheduling. These changes contributed to the emergence of employer-provided work–family benefits at some workplaces and a large scholarship on work–life issues in sociology, business, psychology, family studies, and other fields.

The recent Great Recession, the deepest since the Great Depression, re-created many of the conditions of the deep twin recessions of 1979 to 1982, although the twin recessions were centered in manufacturing and the Great Recession was centered in housing and finance, now in a more globally integrated, technology-mediated economy. US unemployment nationwide was near 10 percent in October 2009, the highest it had been since 1983. The Great Recession exerted downward pressure on hours, but average weekly hours among non-supervisory workers in private nonagricultural industries have actually been declining since 1965 – about five hours to under 34 in 2007, before the Great Recession (US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table B-47, Hours and Earnings in Private Nonagricultural Industries, 1960–2008). Part-time and temporary work remain integral features of the labor market and organizational strategies of flexibility, and workers continue to juggle employment and family care in more or less satisfactory ways. Many public-sector workers have been required to take unpaid furloughs as an alternative to layoffs as governments and schools cope with tighter budgets. UPS pilots averted 300 layoffs by volunteering for enough unpaid time off to save the company $90 million through 2011, and mechanics there considered early retirement, job sharing, reduced hours, or other cost-cutting measures (Howington 2009). Renewed discussion of short-time compensation, which provides prorated unemployment benefits to workers whose hours have been cut to avoid layoffs and is an important part of the social safety net in Germany, France, and a number of other European countries, emerged among policy experts in the US as the Great Recession pushed well into its second year. Short-time compensation is available in only 17 US states and is little used in the majority of them (Abraham and Houseman 2009).

In 2011, jobless recovery – economic growth with high unemployment – continues for the foreseeable future. The recessions of 1991 and 2001 also ended initially in jobless recoveries. There was jobless recovery in the mid-1930s, too. But the 1930s crisis was met in part with a legislative reduction of work time to 40 hours per week in the form of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Legislative adjustment of work time is not on the agenda in this crisis period, to date, in the US. Some European countries have raised the retirement age to reduce retirement spending and offset public debt crises.

Beyond unemployment and non-standard jobs, why a book about work time? In the developed economies, most people work for pay, and work schedules structure time. Work schedules are largely determined by occupations, and because occupations differ, schedules vary. These variations influence how people experience time and, even, whom we have opportunities to know. Unpaid work and leisure routines may (or may not) differ from paid work routines. In developing countries, cultural change occurs as more of the population transitions to routines of market work. In these respects, the study of work time is timeless.

This book is a broad overview of the evolution and current state of work time, primarily in the US, which bears some similarities to other nations, but there are important differences too. It addresses specific questions. How many hours do we work? When do we work? How regularly do we work? Who determines how time is spent and measured? How do we experience work time? What differences do social class, gender, and age make? How do electronic technologies affect work time? How does work time in the US compare to other countries? Cross-national comparison is particularly meaningful because Americans work among the most hours in the world, and the US is among the least generous developed countries regarding vacation time and public policies that support employed parents. The basic argument is that, like all time in human society (Bluedorn 2002), work time is socially constructed – through cultural norms, public policy, within organizations, and via negotiations in households and workplaces. Today’s legal standard workweek of 40 hours in the US is the product of workers’ struggles, organizational changes, and legislative reforms over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because work time is unevenly distributed, it shapes opportunities across social classes, genders, and age groups. For example, the American working class, like that of other developed economies, has feminized since the 1930s due to increasing numbers of women becoming employed after World War II at all occupational levels. As a consequence of deindustrialization in recent decades, workers, especially men, have been displaced from manufacturing jobs into low-level white-collar and service occupations. Men’s and women’s lives have converged, particularly in that they both work outside the home; men contribute more to household work and family care than in the past; and their total work time (paid and unpaid) is similar. Yet gender-typed differences in work and family care persist (Cobble 2007), as do work–life tensions.

Unlike the US, some European countries have used public policy to devise a “pro-social” workweek, while others, like the US, have few regulations and tend to let employers control work time. But even in the US a new class politics is evident, the product of women’s activism in the labor movement – particularly within public- and service-sector unions – which has been a platform for demanding paid family leave, more affordable child care, and paid sick leave (Firestein and Dones 2007; Hartmann and Lovell 2009; Nussbaum 2007). Business competition, budget pressures in the public sector, and workers’ desires for quality time and adequate compensation will continue to make work time a timeless subject.

History, culture, public policy, organization, and the household are necessary contexts for understanding work time. Chapter 1 begins by examining the work routines of hunter-gatherers to think critically about work time and necessity at the most basic level. The transition from church time to clock time in fourteenth-century Europe foregrounds an examination of commodified time in industrial capitalism. While a clock-oriented industrial time sense persists and has generalized outside factories, today we live in a service society in which most work occurs outside factories. Our individual experiences of time may be sufficiently diverse because of occupational and organizational differentiation that, beyond the universal clock, a single collective time sense may not exist. In some occupations, a task-oriented time sense prevails. Ideologies about and experiences of work time are also embedded in the gender division of labor. Therefore, a theoretical exploration of gender and work time complements the class-oriented analysis of commodified time.

Chapter 2 resurrects workers’ and social reformers’ activism and legislative efforts that reduced the statutory workweek, ultimately to 40 hours, in the US. This history is not widely appreciated, and there is a tendency to assume 40 hours is a “natural” length of the workweek. Even more obscure, the 40-hour week was the outcome of an ever so close, almost successful, but failed effort to establish a 30-hour week to create jobs after high unemployment of long duration in the Great Depression.

Since then, the 40-hour workweek has become a rigid legal norm in the US, but changes in the labor market and occupational structure have affected the distribution of work time across workers. Growth in long-hours professional and managerial jobs has accompanied growth in non-standard short-hours jobs, creating a bifurcated distribution of work time. These trends, along with annual hours, are examined in chapter 3, as are increases in recent decades in part-time, temporary, and contract employment. Such “non-standard” work is laden with contradiction in that it can be a source of flexibility and control of time for workers, but control is offset by low wages and few if any benefits. Nor are all workers satisfied with their work hours.

Gender is woven throughout. Historically, protective labor legislation for women (and children) was used by activists as an “entering wedge” to gain limits on work time for all workers. Non-standard work today is distributed unevenly across women and men, and there are gender differences among those who work long or short workweeks, and in work-hours preferences. However, gender relations are most pronounced in chapter 4, where work–family integration is discussed. There I examine the gender division of labor in the household: how this division of labor contributes to a widespread sense of time scarcity; and adaptations of individuals, households, businesses, and public policy to foster work–family integration. Chapter 4 also introduces the notion of work–life, which focuses less on employed parents and more on a broad array of workers’ experiences of integrating and managing the boundary between work and the rest of life.

European countries are far ahead of the US in enacting public policies that reconcile work–family, albeit imperfectly. Some practices reinforce gender inequity, whereas others deliberately encourage gender equity. These European cases, covered extensively in the scholarly literature, provide valuable lessons for the US. Chapter 5 takes a global perspective, situating European policy within European work-time regimes more generally and contrasting their shorter workweeks to the long weeks in developing countries.

Chapter 6 looks ahead in considering the electronic frontier of work time, as well as contradictory strategies to customize work time in employees’ and employers’ interests. I encourage bold critical thought about work time on a number of fronts: current sluggish job growth, work–life integration, and long-term environmental sustainability. Alternative fuels and technologies and “green” consumer practices are essential components of a new “green” economy. Should work time be part of that vision too?

Conflict, control, and change are analytic themes with multiple meanings. Conflict over work time occurs in different areas: between employers and workers (e.g., how much, when, and how intensely to work); couples in their homes when juggling the demands of paid work and family care; and organizational practices, societal work-time trends, and extant public policies. Control refers to employers’ efforts to control workers’ time and productivity on the job; workers’ desires to control their time to control their lives; and public policies that aid or undermine employers’ efforts and workers’ desires. Change refers to the historical evolution of work-time conventions, present trends, future trajectories, and unpredictable ruptures that may result from unanticipated events.

In every area of scholarship, a time comes when it is fruitful to abstract from the minutiae of individual studies for purposes of broad examination. That is the main goal of this book. The work-time literature in the social sciences has grown in the past 30 years, much of it focused on work–family or work–life integration and labor market trends. Organization specialists are turning their attention to temporal structures within organizations. Scholars’ attention to work time expresses not only their personal interests, motivations, and expertise, but also reflects broader social concerns. Yet rarely are these literatures brought under a single umbrella to inform each other or situated in the long historical trajectory of work time and reform activism. I hope my attempt at integration will be useful as more researchers pursue work time as an area of study and instructors cover it in their courses. And I hope all of us together can stimulate widespread discussion of the time of work in our lives.