Abstract
A sick child, a canceled school day, getting sick ourselves. All of these are what Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel refer to as “normal unpredictabilities,” or routine disruptions in our work schedules and family life. These disruptions are pervasive in the lives of most families, and yet research on work rarely acknowledges the problems that both people and organizations face in managing routine unpredictabilities. In this clearly written and engaging book, Clawson and Gerstel illustrate how control over unpredictability in our work and family lives is strongly shaped by the intersecting influences of gender and class.
Clawson and Gerstel have chosen to look at workers in four occupations in the medical-health sector—doctors, nurses, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and nursing assistants—because in these settings, someone has to be on duty at all times of the day, all days of the year. The occupations in their sample form a classic two-by-two table of class and gender. Doctors and nurses are professionals and relatively advantaged, while EMTs and nursing assistants are working-class. On the gender axis, nurses and nursing assistants are overwhelmingly women, while EMTs and doctors are predominately male.
Clawson and Gerstel skillfully show how gender and class intersect to result in different—and unequal—family and work arrangements. For example, physicians and nurses are at the top of the hierarchy in terms of education and earnings, and they exerted the most control over their work schedules. However, while physicians largely chose to work long hours, nurses typically used their control in the workplace to create schedules that accommodated their family needs. Because of the high demand for nurses, organizations did not penalize nurses for taking unexpected days off to care for a child or a parent, and many made use of the Family and Medical Leave Act. In contrast, family needs rarely interfered with a physician’s long work hours, as most physicians in their sample had wives and/or nannies that would handle a child’s sickness or unexpected school cancelation.
Unlike the physicians followed by Clawson and Gerstel, the predominately male EMTs had far more family responsibilities and were much more likely to take time off of work to care for a sick child. They typically had wives that worked, and there was a general understanding among their peers and supervisors that missing work for family reasons was expected and acceptable.
At the bottom of both the class and gender hierarchy were the nursing assistants. An important contribution of this book—in addition to showing the intersection of gender and class in work–family negotiations—is to emphasize the poor working conditions of nursing assistants in nursing homes. The nursing homes where Clawson and Gerstel observed gave their nursing assistants little control over their work schedules, and one facility penalized nursing assistants for using the sick days to which they were entitled. Clawson and Gerstel write that despite the fact that many nursing assistants are the primary caregivers for their children and their lives are complicated by their near poverty wages, as a rule the employers of nursing assistants are not family-friendly and do not attempt to accommodate families.
For nursing assistants, and to a lesser extent for workers in the other occupations, Clawson and Gerstel emphasize the importance of coworkers in managing “normal unpredictabilities.” For unusual or unpredictable scheduling problems, the solution was far more likely to come from coworkers than supervisors. Switching shifts with coworkers provided a way for people to evade the rigidity and harshness of employer-imposed schedules and rules.
Finally, although physicians were at the top of the gender and class hierarchy, Clawson and Gerstel found that physicians widely shared a “rhetoric of constraint” in talking about their work schedules. In short, physicians felt pressure to work long hours to support an affluent lifestyle and stay-at-home wife or nanny, as well as to earn the respect of their colleagues, but they resented the fact that they must do so. Many expressed that they wished they could choose to work fewer hours.
Clawson and Gerstel’s data collection took place during a particular economic context, specifically a nursing shortage during the late 1990s and early 2000s. This shortage has lessened since the recession, and I wonder whether nurses still have the same power to negotiate their schedules in today’s economic climate. Further, the sample of physicians was predominantly male. Clawson and Gerstel spend little time discussing female physicians, but one wonders if they would adopt a “rhetoric of constraint,” or whether they would behave more like the nurses, using their power and control to make their schedule accommodate family life. These questions emerge from Clawson and Gerstel’s compelling illustration of the ways in which work and family inevitably collide, and how class and gender shape our negotiations between our work and family lives.