Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s-2000s (The American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology) by Arne L. Kalleberg

Author:Arne L. Kalleberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781610447478
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Published: 2011-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Time at Work: Hours, Intensity, and Control

TIME IS a central aspect of the employment relationship and a key feature of the quality of jobs. Social scientists have long recognized that control over the use of time underlies the organization of production practices and power relations in the workplace. Questions about how much time workers spend at work and who controls what they do during this time have been fundamental to labor-management struggles concerning the restructuring of time, such as defining the length of the working day.1

Both scholars and the general public have raised concerns that Americans are working increasingly hard and suffering from a “time squeeze” between their work and family lives. Attention was first drawn to this issue by Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1991), in which she argued that Americans were working more hours than ever before, based on an analysis of data from the CPS.2 Many academic and popular writers have since decried the time expectations that tether men and women to the workplace.3 A number of these writers have called for a reapportionment of time for men and women to achieve balance in their lives, a notion that expresses a particular value (and one that has taken on greater urgency) in contemporary life.

This chapter provides an overview of two main dimensions related to the role of time at work. The first is how hard people work. The commitment to working hard is deeply rooted in the American character and can be traced back to the Protestant work ethic. Americans have traditionally placed great importance on the value of hard work and have tended to regard work as a central life interest. There are two components to how hard people work: how many hours they spend at work and how much effort they expend during that period of time.4 I explore both of these components of working hard by examining trends in the number of hours or the duration of time that Americans have worked since the 1970s, as well as the intensity of the labor, or how hard or fast people work and how much work they have to do.

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