The Impacts of Worktime Control in Context

Jackie Stein

doi:10.1177/2158244015581554

Abstract

This article examines the relationships between workers’ control over their working time and their well-being, looking at how these relationships differ across a set of health care occupations that are stratified by class, gender, and race (physicians, nurses, emergency medical technicians [EMTs], and certified nursing assistants [CNAs]). Across occupations, workers’ ability to control their schedules decreases their job-related stress. The results show that different dimensions of worktime control (WTC) affect workers in different occupations in distinctive ways, offering a corrective to prior work that combines workers who occupy different locations in the system of social stratification. Among nursing assistants—the most socially marginalized group in the study—the relationships between particular aspects of WTC and job stress were distinct from those associations among the other three occupations, reinforcing the importance of examining these relationships in occupationally specific contexts. This kind of comparative perspective illuminates the ways distributions of intangible resources such as WTC both emerge from and reinforce existing patterns of social stratification. The implications of these differences for research and policy are discussed.

Highlights

In the wake of the “Great Recession,” employers’ attempts to cut labor costs have often involved controlling workers’ time
This study focuses on four occupations within this industry: physicians, nurses, emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and certified nursing assistants (CNAs)—jobs that are highly stratified by gender, class, and race (Glazer, 1991; Glenn, 1992; Hine, 1989; Scherzer, 2003)
The findings show that different dimensions of worktime control (WTC) affect the four occupations in distinctive ways, offering a corrective to prior work that does not distinguish between workers who occupy different locations in the system of social stratification

Summary

Introduction

In the wake of the “Great Recession,” employers’ attempts to cut labor costs have often involved controlling workers’ time. Economic conditions since the beginning of the “Great Recession” have only made disputes over work time more intense Both those who struggle to find sufficient hours and those who contend with long hours and overwork feel economically trapped and socially coerced, the nature of these disputes vary across a segmented labor force (Glenn, 2002; Jacobs & Gerson, 2004; Negrey, 2012; Uttal & Tuominen, 1999). It is these differences in the ways differently situated workers are impacted by different kinds of struggles for worktime control (WTC) that are the focus of this article. In addition to being increasingly dominant forces in the landscape of work, these organizations in the health care industry are places of visible segmentation by gender, race, and class, making them crucial sites for studying the processes that maintain inequality

Methods

Results

Conclusion