Wrong title; there's more about the (more vital) subject of how to fit anything other than work around the schedules enforced by the '24/7' economy. Two main points; first, that 24/7 is self-reinforcing: when one big factory or call center is open all night, support businesses start running later and later shifts, until much of a city is all-hours. Second, it's self-reinforcing for working families, as the poorest parents are most likely to work different shifts (to avoid paying for daycare), and this is hard on the people, and their marriages, and possibly bad for their chances of promotion; so they never can afford daycare.
Like Divergent Paths, this book is crammed with statistics. I only skimmed this one, so my summary is feeble and untrustworthy. Also, I think these stats tell less clear a story; in specific cases there are odd hiccups about what combination of traits correlate with a given outcome. Much of the data is really trying to find out what happens at home with parents in shift work; who sees the kids awake, who does the housework, whose schedule wins. These are messy numbers, as there are so many possible schedules, and the parents' philosophies or ideologies have much to do with who does what.
One of the most depressing results is that most nonstandard-hours-working mothers report that they aren't doing it because the schedule has an advantage for them, but because they couldn't find better employment. This is part of the pattern of making service and culture work paid instead of familial; restaurant and care-facility work is still very female, low-paid, and ill-scheduled. (It was already so when done by not-married-yet female servants for other women in houses owned by men, of course.) I was hoping for the labor principles that once insisted on a 40-hour workweek and the surety of old age without poverty to hold out longer. I wonder whether we could actually afford to pay useful service work—I think so, but it's true that we don't know since we've never tried it, but we ought to if the attempt is anything but goofy. I sure notice that the political will for those labor principles vanished like water into sand when the possible franchise for them extended. And if we don't hang together, we shall all hang separately.
ISBN: 0871546701
So wrote clew in History (21st c.). | TrackBack