Contemporary American Capitalism, Gender, and Work Schedule Instability

652 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Elaine McCrate Contemporary American Capitalism, Gender, and Work Schedule Instability Time and place are the coordinates of social life. We work with others or enjoy their company at specific moments and locations. As such, the instrumental value of one person's time often depends on its configuration with respect to others: using time to get income or pleasure often depends not only on having enough of it, but also on being able to synchronize with other people. The instrumental value of time includes its option value: while doing one thing, we often like to maintain our availability to do something else, conditional on specific circumstances . The instrumental value of time, including its option value, is highly gendered, with many mothers in particular wishing to hold jobs while being flexibly available to respond to children's needs—sickness , no-show babysitters, soccer games, appointments with teachers— which are sometimes known well in advance and at other times not. But the value of time is not only instrumental. It is also symbolic, constructing and conveying meanings and understandings of social life. The symbolic significance of availability in particular "transcends its merely practical value."1 "Ever-availability" for one's children is central to social understandings of good mothering. There are socially prescribed hierarchies of availability: for mothers much more than fathers, 1. Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 146. Elaine McCrate 653 one typically expects children to come first unconditionally ("drop everything" in the event of need), followed in some order by jobs, other family members, and friends. For fathers more than mothers, availability for jobs comes first: a "good provider" will be predisposed, for example, to accept last-minute assignments of overtime. As such, gender is fundamentally enmeshed with the symbolic value of time, and its instrumental and symbolic values are difficult to disentangle.2 The symbolic character of time accentuates fundamental gender distinctions, serving "as a most effective principle of differentiation."3 Capitalist firms also value time, but with overwhelming emphasis on its instrumental value to them, specifically for making profits. Employers coordinate the working time of employees with suppliers, customers , and other workers. In a complex environment with many players, employers also want to keep their options open. When shipments arrive, or many customers come through the door, or workers call in sick, they would like to call more employees in to work. When machines break down or sales are slow, they would like to send workers home. Employers want to keep their options open in the utilization of labor, but toward a much different objective than that of their employees: maximizing workers' availability in order to maximize profits. Employers' priorities often entail unstable scheduling, that is, job time variability controlled by employers, not workers.4 While the modal job schedule in the affluent world still entails fairly stable hours (often rigid hours that workers cannot change), in jobs where the value employers place on workers' time regularly varies—common in manufacturing , retail trade, warehousing, transportation, hospitality, and health services —unstable scheduling has become commonplace. It is one aspect of what Europeans call "unsocial hours": affected workers often cannot 2. Mary Blair-Loy, Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 3. Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms, 138. 4. Susan J. Lambert, "Passing the Buck: Labor Flexibility Practices That Transfer Risk onto Hourly Workers," Human Relations 61, no. 9 (2008): 1203–27; Susan J. Lambert and Julia R. Henly, "Work Scheduling Study: Managers' Strategies for Balancing Business Requirements with Employee Needs" (Chicago : University of Chicago, School of Social Service Administration, 2010), https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/3/1174/files/2018/06 /univ_of_chicago_work_scheduling_manager_report_6_25_0-1gq8rxc.pdf. 654 Elaine McCrate plan regular activities with others, such as participation in family or religious life. They also lose much of their ability to address unforeseen contingencies, such as family members' illnesses. Chronic instability in work schedules is also strongly associated with poor sleep and psychological distress.5 Nonetheless, capitalists rarely pay for availability, at least among hourly workers. Usually it is free, and there

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