The Time Bind

Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling. 2004. Chapter 1 from The CareerMystique: Cracks in the American Dream. Rowman & Littlefield.

This article is excellent. Moen and Roehling discuss both the feminine mystique and the oft ignored “career mystique” and the issues they both cause in current American society. The image of the “ideal worker” has persisted into our current day and age where it truly does not belong. Moen and Roehling discuss how the career mystique was born of the feminine mystique because the ideal of a wife staying at home and working full-time within the home to take care of all of the care needs of the family allowed husbands to dedicate their entire lives to their work. They define the “career mystique” as “the expectation that employees will invest all their time, energy, and commitment throughout their “prime” adult years in their jobs, with the promise of moving up in seniority or ascending job ladders” (p. 5). There are many issues with this idea. First, while this “traditional” breadwinner model was truly only ever possible for the elite few, today with the breakdown of gender roles and ideals of equality, it becomes even more impossible. Most women and mothers are now in the workforce, and while in the workforce they are expected to commit to the same ideal worker mentality as their husbands. Neither husbands nor wives any longer have someone to back them up at home while they devote their time and energy to the workplace. Additionally, in today’s cutthroat capitalist environment and unstable economy, all of this hard work no longer even guarantees job security – much less a guarantee of rising in the ranks. The traditional breadwinner model, as Moen and Roehling point out, decouples paid work from the family sphere, therefore making it possible for companies to essentially ignore the fact that families exist and consider it a “private” matter, which also coincides with the American individualist ideals. The authors make an excellent point when they describe how work-family “balance” and even supposed “family-friendly” policies such as flex plans and child care are actually all about supporting work, not families. Childcare options allow parents to work longer hours and devote more of themselves to their jobs, not their families. And many workers even fear taking advantage of any family policies, such as maternal or paternal leave, available to them because they want to be seen as fully committed to their jobs. The authors explain, “the Faustian bargain of trading a lifetime of paid work for a lifetime of income security is probably gone forever” (p. 9). Therefore, workers must fight to keep their jobs, and any perceived falters can work against them. Rather than working against the impossible demands of the workplace, the authors suggest, “we view the metaphor of balance as a cultural convention reinforcing gender inequalities at work and at home, while failing to challenge the career mystique” (p.10). I also liked their description of jobs as “greedy” institutions, “assuming workers were able and willing to work long hours, to put in mandatory or “voluntary” overtime, to move for occupational advancement, to travel as needed, sometimes to work weekends, and, more recently, to work from home” (p. 11). My mother has had to do all of the above over the years in order to maintain her career and ensure she keeps her job. As Moen and Roehling also discuss, many workers are forced to take on the roles of other workers who have been laid off. My mother has been working as much as three jobs at one time. I do not understand how this kind of employee abuse is permissible, but I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that employees in today’s workforce do not feel they can demand what they need from employers for fear of losing their jobs. As Moen and Roehling point out, smaller and smaller percentages of employees are unionized, and it seems that employees are disenfranchised and basically on their own. Technology has even worked against us in some ways by enabling workers to work all the time, anywhere. These issues can be explained using the idea of “structural lag,” which the authors define as a process “in which old customs and routines persist in the face of changing realities” (p. 23). American society in particular seems to have serious issues with structural lag. Americans continue to put in more hours than the rest of the advanced world and reap fewer benefits. My personal speculation is that this country was heavily based on ideals and our mindsets are very ingrained with the “American Dream” and ideas of individualism and hard work. Anything perceived as “help” or assistance of any kind is initially shunned as a threat to our independence as Americans. Therefore, we are very unwilling to accept structural change that challenges the status quo or insinuates in any way that Americans may need help. Until we question what Moen and Roehling term the “lockstep” career path or the “career mystique,” we are trapped in the impossible work-family “balance” and the time bind.

Hochschild, Arlie. 2001. Chapters 14 and 15 from The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Holt Paperbacks.

Hochschild creates a brilliant in-depth analysis of the “time bind” in chapters 14 and 15 from her book. She delves deeply into the minds of workers as well as the structures surrounding them in order to more fully understand the ways in which the workplace is allowed to monopolize these people’s time and lives. The first thing she discusses is the fact that many workers may actually feel more comfortable in their workplace than in their home. In the workplace, people may feel more appreciated and more competent, and overall more valued. Studies show that workers “appreciate themselves more at work than at home,” which likely connects to the strong connection between identity and productivity and work (p. 200). The workplace reinforced these feelings with the “Total Quality” system, which Hochschild examines in the Amerco company. This system focuses on encouraging workers and making them feel (no matter where they are in the company) that they are important and have autonomy within the system and their work does matter. Through personal recognition (rather than money) employers motivate workers and try to keep them happy on the job. I found it very interesting that some of the criteria employees are judged on included items such as “seeks feedback on personal behaviors,” “senses changes in attention level and mood,” and “adapts personality to the situation and people involved” (p. 206). These criteria were things I had not expected to see on a corporate assessment because they are stereotypically “feminine” qualities and I wonder if the influx of women into the workplace has encouraged more of this type of assessment. Rather than a focus on competition and intensity, there seems to be an emphasis on teamwork. Hochschild points out that “the sense of being cared for encouraged workers to adopt a more personal orientation towards work time” and therefore become more committed and personally connected to their work, which would further point them towards a focus on work rather than family (p. 208). This more personalized attitude towards the workplace leads to a more structured and “efficient” model of running the household on limited time frames. Even “quality time” is now bracketed into a certain section of time during the day, and therefore often does not accomplish its purpose of “quality.” Hochschild makes an excellent point in her observation that the family is falling apart, with divorces and remarriages and second an third divorces, with little or no assistance towards maintaining the family. She explains, “large sums of money are spent to stage “commitment ceremonies” between the company and its workers whenever a “divorce” seems to threaten. But who rewards a difficult new kind of emotional work or watches for declining profit margins at home? Who calls for renewed vows of commitment there?” (p. 211). Work in the home is rarely as highly rewarded as work in the workplace, and therefore many people may feel more highly valued at work than they do in the home and may spend more time there as a result, despite the large amounts of guilt. So, Hochschild argues that while monetary issues and the fear of loss of employment are factors that keep workers from rebelling against norms (as Moen and Roehling state) it is also personal choice that keeps them in the workplace. Hochschild discusses the “cult of efficiency” within the home, where everything is downsized into the smallest possible piece of time, which is typically not ideal for children. Parents often discuss a desire for their children to be “independent” as reasoning for some of their methods. Hochschild says, “of a three-month-old child in nine-hour daycare, a father assured me, “I want him to be independent” (p. 228). In chapter 15, Hochschild examines some of the new approaches parents (particularly mothers) use to help them combine work and family. Most of these things are about outsourcing various pieces of the household responsibilities, such as using cleaning services and nannies, as well as more creative options. She uses the example of “home-cooked” meals delivered in Tupperware so they can easily be reheated and given to children without all of the hassle of cooking. The family I nannied for over the summer actually did do this. While I was available to make breakfast and lunch, perfectly portioned dinners were delivered in containers and kept in the fridge to be distributed throughout the week. The idea of a child needing to be “independent” and the minimization of a child’s needs are in direct opposition to the “intensive mothering” model. It is interesting to see how the idea and value of children changes with the needs of the marketplace. She also brings up summer camp and other similar organizations that parents can utilize for childcare and claim are helping their children. One of the mothers I babysit for sent her daughter to sleep-away camp for almost the entire summer, and then gave me a whole speech about how “good it was for her.” As far as paying for errands, just last week I was paid to pick up a grandmother at her hotel and drive her and her granddaughter around so they could have quality time and go out to lunch – while the mother was at work. Hochschild describes, “the time-starved mother is being forced more and more to choose between being a parent and buying a commodified version of parenthood from someone else” (p. 232).

I love her discussion of the idea of the split identity of parents – the “actual selves” of the parents and the “potential selves.” My mother absolutely has done this our entire lives and continues to do it today. It is a never-ending, “if I had the time I would…” fill-in-the-blank. She always harbored intense guilt about never being around, though as a single mother she had no choice but to work. Many Amerco parents spoke of “going places and doing things ‘when the children are older’” (p. 237). My mother did this, and now we are older, and we still have done none of the things she spoke of. It really is sad. So many people are living one life, while secretly wishing they were living another.

Again, most of these issues tie back to the ultimate problem of the ideal worker in American society. The ideal worker does not make a good parent.

Bianchi, Suzanne. 2000. "Maternal Employment and Time with Children: Dramatic Change or Surprising Continuity?" Demography 37: 401-414.

Suzanne Bianchi essentially makes the opposite argument to the previous articles. She argues that while women have entered the workplace, their overall parenting time has not decreased and has had very little negative impact on children. She concludes, “that mothers’ time and attention to children has been far more constant over the past few decades (and that the gap between employed and nonemployed mothers regarding time with children is far smaller) than we might have expected, given the increase in women’s labor force participation” (p. 412). I feel that her argument, while substantially supported by numbers and research, does contain quite a few holes, and is also somewhat vague. She explains that we have overestimated how much time stay-at-home moms actually spent directly parenting their children and argues that working mothers spend a similar amount of time parenting. She strips down parenting to the direct act of spending time with the child while doing no other activity. I believe she severely underestimates the value of the parent’s simple presence. Of course, the quality of the time and the parenting is of extreme importance as well, but I do believe she discounts the value of simply having a mother present with their child, and “there for” their children, in the physical sense of support as well as the psychological. Additionally, some of the studies she uses in this article actually work against her argument. For example, “Bryant and Zick acknowledge that employment outside the home reduces time spent caring for children, other things being equal” (p. 404) therefore suggesting a direct correlation between employment and a decrease in time caring for children. However, it is true that Bianchi’s main argument does deal more with the significance of that decrease in time with children rather than lack of it altogether. I also am not sure I agree with or can connect with her argument. Having my mother working full-time (granted, she was a single mother, which does change the picture) absolutely took away from my time with her. My precious little time with her also was not quality time because we were constantly in a rush to get somewhere and she was always tired, stressed, and usually angry. I would argue that this absolutely impacts a child because a child is very sensitive to the moods of a parent. A stressed parent will often cause a child to stress. Bianchi throws together a lot of numbers from various studies, but all of these numbers come to different conclusions that do not always support her argument, making it all the more vague. However, she does have an advantage over the other articles in that she takes into account part-time work. The previous articles mostly discuss dual-earning, full-time parents. She also brings up good points surrounding kids’ time in school and the small amount of time in which they are actually “available” to be parented. She also brings fathers into the argument, claiming that working mothers allow more time for fathering to come into the picture, which I believe everyone would view as a positive development. Overall, while I don’t fully agree with her argument, Bianchi brings some new perspectives to the surface and adds to the work-family discussion. I somewhat dislike her argument primarily because it will not assist in any way with the battle with the workplace for family time and the breaking down of the “ideal worker” mentality.

Jacobs, Jerry and Kathleen Gerson. 2001. "Overworked Individuals or Overworked Families: Explaining Trends in Work, Leisure and Family Time." Work and Occupations 28: 40-63.

The beginning of this article had me questioning its relevance with its discussion of “leisure time” and its insinuating argument that Americans now have more leisure time, which would be an argument I would take issue with. However, the focus of the article seemed to switch dramatically as it delved into the research, and the conclusions were actually very significant. Jacobs and Gerson explain their findings that it is not necessarily an increase of the total hours worked that has created this work-family crisis in America, but the changing composition of families and the dramatic rise of dual-earner couples. The authors compare the hours worked as well as other factors between households in 1970 and households in 1997. They found differences in individual work hours to be within a few hours – about 3 hours’ increase – but this was not the significant finding. Their observation of gender differences in hours worked, and especially in hours worked depending on the number of children, was very important. Men with more children tended to work more than their childless counterparts and women with more children tended to work less. However, again, the difference in actual time worked per individual was only a difference of a few hours. The authors note, “that changes in the working time of individual workers cannot explain the rise of family time deficits. Rather, these changes stem from a transformation in family composition and gender relations” (p. 60). It is also alarming to note the increase in the number of households with dual-earner couples who work 100+ hours per week – even when they have children. These couples are mostly highly educated and involved in powerful careers. Unfortunately, this is another example of the way in which the ideal worker mentality rules the lives of Americans. These people would not be at their level of success if they did not put in such ridiculous time commitments. Jacobs’ and Gerson’s conclusion that “the amount of flexibility on the job, and not just the total number of hours, needs to be considered” as well as their belief that “the time has come to create a more flexible and family-supportive workplace, including more options for reducing working time” are both constructive solutions to the problem of work-family balance in the U.S. While I do believe that the outrageous hours worked are problematic, the authors do make a good point that the underlying problem is more about flexibility and accounting for the fact that workers do have families and children and other responsibilities to consider. However, policies can be put in place, but they will not be properly utilized until Americans are able to transform their mindset. Current policies are rarely taken advantage of by Americans because they fear the loss of their jobs or the implication that they are not ideal workers. We need to change our mentality before structural changes are effective.

Side note:

In my research I would like to explore not only the need for paid maternal leave, but perhaps whether or not women would take full advantage of it in the U.S. or if they would still fear not being viewed as equals in the workforce or getting behind on their work.