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Topics: Work & Empowerment

Time, Work, and Civic Values
Democratizing Our Choices

Copyright © 1995 by Carmen Sirianni and Andrea Walsh

Contents

I. From Rigidity to Flexibility
II. The Male Career Model
III. Changes in the Life Course
IV. Time Famine?
V. Working Time Innovation and the Self Management of Time
IV. Gender Equity and Family Time
VII. The Role of Government in the Democratic Politics of Time
VIII. The Moral Economy of Time
Notes

"You have to give up something to be a success in business. There's not time for everything. Me...I have very little time for my spiritual life. I don't have a civic life. And I do very little with friendships—anything that doesn't have to do with business. I don't have time to cultivate relationships that aren't profitable."

- Lorraine Mecca, successful businesswoman 0

"I felt like I was going under, and I couldn't do my job because I was pretty much in pieces. I was furious at my brother, who didn't help at all. My fifteen year old daughter is mad at me because I am so engaged with my mother. My son has stopped visiting me. And the friends who had been wonderful and supportive through the babies and the divorce just faded away now that I needed them most. I am alternately so sad about my mother's decline that I can't stop crying and so enraged that my life is being messed up that I want to dump her. I used to think that I was good at crises, but this just goes on and on, and I'm falling apart."

- Juanita Eubanks, 48 year old daughter of chronically ill mother 1

Twenty years ago, economist Steffan Linder characterized the condition of advanced industrial societies in terms of a "time famine," and wondered how we might redirect the path of progress that has led to an affluence of goods (at least for the middle classes) at the cost of a pervasive scarcity of time for so many of the other worthwhile activities of life.2 Lorraine Mecca's choices were quite familiar to Linder. Engagement in community affairs, committed friendships or spiritual life were simply too costly relative to the lost earnings or foregone career opportunities. To be sure, in 1970 Linder would have recognized the dilemmas as those of professional and managerial men—although he would probably not have been surprised to find that greater gender equity at work would have the ironic effect of democratizing the sense of time scarcity as well.

Lorraine Mecca's choice to capitalize on as much of her time as possible, however, does not simply reflect gender equity, but disguises a deeper inequity, since the unpaid caring work of family and community life, the work of nurturing and repairing the moral fabric of society, must be done by others, and often at great cost to their own personal and professional lives. Today the Lorainne Meccas may get labelled as "career-primary" women, willing and able to devote their time single-mindedly to their jobs, just as men have been expected to do, while their sisters who choose to spend time raising children risk being placed on the "mommy track," with opportunities delayed if not decidedly derailed.

Or, like Juanita Eubanks, a middle-aged black woman who struggled through divorce and single-parenthood to remain full time in the labor market, they may find themselves on the "daughter track," because they refuse to turn a blind eye to the needs of their elderly parents, or to attach a dollar value to time for care. If Juanita Eubanks unravels much further, she may lose her job or fall into the part-time ghetto with other mommy-and daughter-tracked caregivers. Her time squeeze is thus also an equity crunch. In fact, it represents a moral crisis that strains family and friendship support networks to the breaking point.

But the moral crisis is no less evident in the poverty of choice represented by Lorranie Mecca's decision to forego community, friendship and spirituality as activities whose opportunity costs are simply too great. Today, the successful woman is expected to swallow the clock and imbibe the dictum that "time is money," and in this she is aided by an army of consultants and popular guides that instruct her in the "mastery and management of time"—though one can perhaps detect some regret in her voice. Juanita Eubanks, on the other hand, may be falling apart, but she chooses with a moral clarity that reflects an alternative sense of reciprocity over the course of time. She is sustained by the knowledge that she and her sister are providing the best care possible, and she notes with pride: "My mother will say, `Lord, isn't it something: my baby's taking care of me just like I took care of her,' and we'll all laugh."

I. From Rigidity to Flexibility

Temporal rigidities in the organization of social life are unfreezing, and this process presents us with genuine opportunities as well as distinct hazards. Time is increasingly becoming a contested terrain, and our very notions of individual autonomy, gender equity, democratic opportunity, and moral responsibility are likely to become ever more dependent on our capacity to develop a pluralist and democratic politics for reorganizing time in postindustrial society.

Rigid temporal norms, linear life course models, and gendered distributions of market and household labor time have been made increasingly problematic by a variety of developments in work, family, education, aging, technology, and ecology. Prominent among these, of course, is that the labor force participation rates of women, including women with young children, have been steadily increasing in the post-war period, and are beginning to converge with those of men. No other factor seems as important as this in accounting for the sense of time famine in many families. Women who try to combine paid work with household responsibilities, and especially with raising children, are often confronted with a double burden, especially in the face of the resistance of most men to share significantly in the latter tasks.3

Women's coping strategies include cutting back on household labor time (e.g. by lowering standards of cleanliness, hiring help, having fewer children, and scheduling more "quality time" with them), and working part-time and discontinuously in the labor market. Working women with children have thus, not surprisingly, been in the forefront of efforts to develop innovative working time policies, such as job sharing, flexible hours and part-time career lines with continued access to opportunity and equitable salaries and benefits, which I will discuss further below. Those women (and men) who have come to be most supportive of egalitarian and non-traditional family and sex role patterns show the strongest interest in flexible work options in daily as well as life course scheduling, and the greatest willingness to forego earnings for increases in free time.

II. The Male Career Model

The male career model hoards the time of the individual, and requires that family and other commitments be canceled, interrupted or postponed if need be. Competition is temporally tight and age-graded, and many of the most vigorous pressures and promotion stages occur during childbearing years, thus disadvantaging those who cut back on work in order to bear and care for children. Continuous and uninterrupted progress along a linear time line is the ideal of serious career pursuit. And willingness to devote surpluses of time above and beyond what is formally required serves as a sign of trustworthiness for organizations greedy for employees' commitment and often uncertain how to measure their real contributions. The time of wives, in this model, is directly and indirectly enlisted by husbands and their employers (e.g. typing manuscripts or hosting colleagues and business prospects). And wives' availability for housework and childcare permits husbands to pursue their careers single-mindedly and respond unhindered to organizational demands that require unplanned late nights at the office or time away for business travel.

The institutional hegemony of this time-devouring linear career model is reinforced at a deeper symbolic and cultural level, where men imagine themselves conquering time heroically by rationalizing it, thereby transcending nature and repetition (often associated with female temporal rhythms of giving birth or caring for children and the home), and protecting themselves against vulnerability, limits, and even death. The rationalized view of time inherited from the Renaissance, which promised that those who knew how to exploit time would become "the master of all things," and which portrayed time as a strict father figure watching lest precious moments be wasted, or as an antagonist that men heroically battle, has embedded itself deeply into the male career model.

Men in a variety of careers with excessive time demands often express a sense of heroic sacrifice and invulnerability, and even take pride in earning the "purple heart" in the face of professional and personal burnout. Some, like Seth Stein, a 36-year old litigation lawyer, interpret their addiction to work as a sacrifice to their families, even as they forfeit emotional bonds to their spouses and children in the process. Many men, to be sure, live up to the male career model only reluctantly, but even they are generally unwilling to express this reluctance publicly, lest they be considered unserious, even "wimps," by colleagues and employers. Bill Wallace, a 36-year old product manager in a high tech firm, for instance, is aware that he is shortchanging his wife and 10-month old son by working late nights and weekends, but says "it's just that the models of success in the company are people who do that." Bill and other reluctant men, however, asked that their real names not be published.5

This linear and time-devouring career model exercises hegemony insofar as it is accepted as defining the main legitimate route of access to high opportunity in the labor market even by those who are unable (or unwilling) to live up to the terms it establishes, and who blame themselves for such failure, and insofar as those who reject the model have insufficient power to alter those terms.

Paradoxically, the hegemony of this male model of structuring a career has been simultaneously reinforced and challenged by the recent democratization of access to jobs and education for women and others previously excluded. Greater access increases the competition for high opportunity jobs, especially in the slack labor markets of recent decades, and thus, on the supply side, puts a greater premium on employees' utilizing steep levels of time commitment as a method of competing and signaling worthiness, and, on the demand side, strengthens the hand of employers to require such commitments. In this light, Lorraine Mecca's choice, and that of other reluctant women and men who buy into the model, become easier to understand.

However, the greater numbers of women pursuing higher education and professional and managerial careers, or who are unwilling or unable to abandon the labor market completely to become full-time housewives and mothers, continue to create strain for a career model requiring continuous and high levels of time commitment. And thus the agenda of the women's movement, as well as many women not formally aligned with feminist politics, includes at its center more flexible and diverse working time options, and alternative rhythms for integrating work and family over the life course. As the baby boom gives way to the baby bust generation, and labor shortages in the coming years make employers more dependent than ever on attracting and retaining professional and managerial women, the latter may have the opportunity to redefine the male model in a more profound way.

There is a variety of other factors as well that challenge rigid and linear forms of temporal organization. No longer, for instance, are education and work so strictly sequenced and separated. As a growing portion of youth go on to higher education, it becomes more common (especially those from less privileged backgrounds) to combine education with paid work, and this is often facilitated by part-time and other flexible options. Industrial restructuring and technological change displace increasing numbers from their jobs, and shorten the half-life of skills and credentials that once seemed as if they might serve for a lifetime of opportunity and security in the labor market.

Skill renewal and retraining thus become increasingly necessary throughout the work career if the labor force is to adjust to change. The most optimal use of new technologies in postindustrial work settings requires opportunities for continuous learning, and often blurs the distinction between time working on the job and time learning off the job. Longer lifespans make career changes in mid-life more feasible and often desirable, and many blue and white collar workers have come to view recurrent education and "second chances" as a right. For those in low opportunity occupations, this can imply a "deferred right to education," and a rejection of the idea that failure to acquire appropriate training at the earliest possible stages of the life course should permanently disenfranchise the individual from further education and the opportunity it might bring. But even for those with some advanced schooling, recurrent education becomes an avenue to further mobility and career change.

This is consonant with the more general value shifts that have occurred since the 1960s in virtually all industrial countries: a much greater stress on work as a source of self-realization and self-fulfillment, of continued growth and challenge, and for more individualized options and personal autonomy. The transition to adulthood has itself become more extended, diversified and individualized over the past few decades, and psychology has become more oriented to personal development and human plasticity over the entire life span. Educational institutions have responded to these changes with a variety of adult education, "lifetime learning" and "flex degree" programs.

And while the participation of women in the labor market has increased, thus challenging us to develop new ways of integrating paid work and family life, the total proportion of lifetime hours that the average male worker must spend at work has declined significantly since the industrial revolution. A male employee born in the mid-nineteenth century spent roughly 30 percent of his lifetime hours at work, while his grandson born at the end of the century spent 20 percent, and his grandson, in turn, born in the 1950s will spend only 10 percent. These changes generate increasing opportunities and incentives for what Fred Best has called "flexible life planning," thus challenging temporally well-defined and rigidly sequential stages in favor of more fluid, diverse and reversible timing of major life activities.6

III. Changes in the Life Course

Greater longevity among a growing proportion of elderly also increases caregiving needs, most of which are still served by female relatives outside of institutional settings. And as more women remain in the labor market, including those with elderly parents, flexible working time options become even more necessary to accommodate care outside the market. As Bernice Neugarten and Dale Neugarten have argued, "the old distinctions between life periods are blurring in today's society," and particularly as the boundary lines fade in the later years, our aging society is challenged with developing a new definition of productivity and qualitative growth that encompasses various kinds of volunteer, self-help and caring work decoupled from the marketplace and paid labor time.8

We are thus increasingly faced with the question of how to recognize and facilitate such work performed by the elderly themselves, and how to develop supports for their children and others who care for them when they cannot provide adequate care for each other. Can we find ways to help make Juanita Eubanks' choice to return care to her mother a less harried and morally rending one—and can we encourage her brother to likewise recognize such care as work worth doing and time worth giving? The male model of work is at issue as much here as it is in integrating childcare with careers in the market.

The destandardization of working hours is also propelled by changes in technology and product markets. New information technologies lessen time and space constraints for production, communication and service. Telecommuting increases the possibilities of work at home, and blurs the boundary between the two. It can create problems for regulating working conditions for some, but also provide genuine opportunities for flexible work for others. More highly intensive capital investment and rapid upgrading of available technologies encourage employers to extend work into periods of the day and days of the week that were previously outside "normal" working hours in order to recoup investments more quickly. This can entail not only more shift work, but more innovative shift systems, part-time and other flexible arrangements. And in the high-growth area of services, flexible and part-time schedules permit greater responsiveness to peak service times and the broadening of hours when service is available. New computer technologies also make it easier to process employee information, and thus reduce the costs and increase the benefits of hiring people on non-standard schedules.

New technologies may also make the future of employment less certain, although little can be said definitively about the extent of technological unemployment in the coming decades. What can be said, however, is that the traditional response of labor movements to seek across-the-board reductions in the normal workweek has become increasingly problematic. Campaigns for workweek reductions in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s reveal this rather clearly. The 35-hour or 32-hour workweek may retain a certain symbolic value, especially among trade union leaders, but the individual life situations and preferences for worktime among rank and file members have become highly diversified and pluralized, thus making a collective strategy based on across-the-board reductions quite problematic. Unemployment may continue to challenge the ways we distribute work and working time, but the models for redistributing these that we inherit from the past are no longer very compelling.9

We are also approaching ecological limits to quantitative growth models that have previously served to generate employment opportunities and to define the meanings of "the good life" in a consumer society. A pace of production, consumption and disposal that exceed nature's ability to recycle wastes and renew basic resources now appears profoundly problematic for the future of the planet. And the pace of social and economic life can also pos