Abstract
On the normal unpredictability of low-wage work.
One of our students sent the following email, pleading for an extension on her course paper:
I have more than half of my paper done, but I unexpectedly worked every night this weekend. I have documentation of everything, and I tried SO hard to get my shifts covered (I offered whoever took my shift $20, homemade cookies, and a shift cover) and no one would take any of my shifts and I’ve been stressing out and I may be able to finish my paper today, but in the event that I don’t, is there a possibility of an extension?
Rosanna
Since we had just published a book, Unequal Time, about how people face increasing unpredictability in their work hours and schedules, we had a good deal of sympathy for her plight. Just as we heard from Rosanna, we saw in our research that what creates chaos and hardship in so many people’s lives is not just the number of hours they work, but the unpredictability of those hours and the inability to control them. These play havoc with all our neatly laid plans.
Unpredictability is pervasive, but the ability to deal with it depends on the degree of control someone has at work and at home. This control depends on class, gender, and race.
Unpredictability implies events, from both work and home, that disrupt normal routines but that we have to find a way to deal with. It means having to stay at work late or arrive early, being sent home between shifts or upon arrival (without pay because there aren’t enough customers/patients), having much needed shifts cancelled. Or it means having a sick child or relative whose needs throw our schedules into disarray. Such unpredictability is the new normal.
We studied employees and organizations in the medical system—hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, ambulance dispatch centers. At one high-end nursing home we got the complete work records for a six-month period. These showed who was scheduled in advance to work and who, in fact, did work. The stunning finding was that one out of three shifts were not as planned in advance: someone was working when they had not been scheduled, or not working when they had been scheduled. This was a nursing home with very little turnover among patients/residents and much lower than normal rates of staff turnover. We found similar results in a random sample survey of individuals who work in a wide array of organizations.
A waitress checks her scheduled hours.
Morgan, Flickr CC
There is good reason to believe that such normal unpredictability—and the chaos in people’s lives it causes—is happening more often now than in earlier decades. Much of it is created by an economic system in which employers increasingly squeeze workers and run on staffing margins so lean that any absence creates a problem. At the same time, a growing number of organizations hire temps, in effect outsourcing unpredictability to irregular workers whose livelihoods depend on unpredictability in their own schedules as well as in the schedules of regular workers. These broad economic trends all too often create stress, conflicts, and divisions. Add to these changes new technologies that increase the sway of unpredictability. Some comes from emails and cell phones that interrupt us and “require attention” day or night. Some comes from new scheduling software that allows and “requires” managers to send workers home when demand is slack or call them in when demand increases.
As jobs shrink, getting the work done may mean mandatory overtime.
KnitGirl, Flickr CC
Life has also become more unpredictable because economic changes are situated in changing families. Lean staffing now characterizes not only the economy but also the family: More and more women—across race and class—are in the labor force as part of dual-earner couples. Husbands are less able to “outsource” unpredictability to stay-at-home wives. With high rates of divorce and the increase in babies born outside of an ongoing relationship, many more people are single parents (especially single mothers) increasing the impact of unpredictable events.
One unpredictable event cascades, creating others, in what we call a “web of time.” For example, we observed a nurse calling in sick for a Friday evening shift. The scheduler explained that she needed coverage: “So I made a deal, I called one of the nurses that works down there regularly and asked her if she could work. She said no. I said listen—I’ll give you whatever you want. I’ll give you a weekend off. So she did—she picked a weekend off.” As a result, some other nurse had to re-arrange her schedule to work the weekend. That nurse had to ask her grandmother to take care of her children over the weekend; the grandmother—who usually works on Sundays—cancelled work, which meant someone else needed to cover for her. Unpredictability expands to disrupt the lives of more and more people.
Unpredictability is pervasive, but the ability to deal with it depends on the degree of control someone has both at work and at home, and this control depends on class, gender, and race.
We analyzed professional and working-class occupations in which either men or women dominated, because the overall gender composition of the occupation shapes practices, cultural schemas, and policies. Consider two: a male doctor (68% of doctors are men) and a female nursing assistant (93% of nursing assistants are women).
Like other male professionals, male doctors work long hours and complain, often bitterly, about those hours. These doctors stay for what they see as unpredictable time to do paperwork or call a patient to explain that test results don’t look so good. Though they grumble, doctors have significant control over this unpredictability. Why? First, they make a lot of money that they come to believe they need; so they decide to add patients, which adds hours and unpredictability. They could afford to decide otherwise. Second, they feel pressure to work more because they earn respect from their peers; as one said: “the ones who work the most are looked up to.” Third, we rarely saw a male doctor respond to unpredictability coming from his family. When his own child was sick and needed to stay home, he could typically rely on someone else at home—his wife or a paid caregiver (often a low-wage woman with less control, whose life then becomes more unpredictable). Most male doctors, then, do gender in traditional ways, creating unpredictability for the women in their lives.
Women professionals also tend to do gender in conventional ways. Some women doctors worked similarly long and unpredictable hours, but many felt they must cut job hours to respond to family demands. As one woman doctor who worked part time and was married to a man doctor explained, “Just honestly, the vast majority of the burden of the household is on me, and if I were to work more it would just mean I work more and still have that burden.”
Nursing assistants are at the other end of the spectrum in their control of unpredictability both at work and home. Like other low-level service workers, they are often hired for 24-32 hours per week; they must add time—often unexpected, additional shifts—to earn a living wage. At one nursing home we studied, most of the nursing assistants were White, and at the other, 88 percent of the nursing assistants were people of color. At the latter nursing home, although nursing assistants got six paid sick days a year, they were penalized each time they used a sick day. Penalties escalated from verbal to written warnings to dismissal. The nursing assistants, many of whom were single mothers, dealt with this by making use of a range of extended family members. In many cases, this works smoothly; in others, kids may be left alone or with a relative the mother doesn’t fully trust.
A union official told us that “flexibility is the new word for control by management.”
For many years, a focus and aspiration of work-family activists and scholars has been flexible scheduling, allowing people to re-arrange work hours to fit with family demands. What this research shows is that people who get such flexibility usually turn out to be women with professional or managerial positions; comparatively few men take advantage of this flexible scheduling and comparatively few working-class people are offered such flexibility. Now the meaning of flexibility is changing: as unpredictability has increased, employers are rebranding the term, demanding that workers show the “flexibility” to adjust to uncertain schedules and last-minute changes employers impose. The increasing deployment of the rhetoric of flexibility indicates a trend toward unpredictability but also masks a struggle to control it. A union official told us that “flexibility is the new word for control by management.”
To say that “unpredictability is the new normal” is to say that most of the time people take it for granted, assume their lives will be chaotic, and often blame themselves. Many seek extra shifts (themselves unpredictable) so they can pay the bills, gain the admiration of peers, or avoid housework and tensions at home. Some resent the rules governing unpredictable schedules and fight back. Workers generally assume that if they unexpectedly need time off, they must talk to coworkers to arrange coverage themselves. As one said to her co-workers: “If this is gonna be the policy, we have to help each other out. Pretty much everyone’s good with that; if you ask them, they’ll work, cause they know they might need it.” Management, they feel, creates unpredictability, but does not solve its problems. As one nursing assistant told us, “What are you going to do? You’re not going to be able to really change it. They [employers] do what they want, basically. I’ve been here four years and I know that.” Workers and their families solve the problems of unpredictability as best they can, providing flexibility rather than benefiting from it.