Work Time Conflict, Control, and Change [Hardcover]

Work Time is a sociological overview of a complex web of relations that shapes much of our experience of work and life yet often goes without critical examination.

Cynthia Negrey examines work time past and present, exploring structural economic change and the gender division of labor to ask: what are the historical, cultural, public policy, and business sources of current work-time practices? Topics addressed include work-time reduction in the US culminating in the 40-hour statute of 1938, recent trends in annual and weekly hours, overtime, part-time work, temporary employment, work-family integration, and international comparisons. She focuses on the US in a global context and explores how a new political economy of work time is taking shape.

This book brings together existing knowledge from sociology, anthropology, history, labor economics, and family studies to answer its central question and will change the way upper-level students think about the time we devote to work.

List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 From Field to Factory and Beyond 9

Original Affluence? 10

Medieval Church Time, Modern Clock Time 14

Commodified Time 18

Industrial Time-discipline 19

Time-work Discipline in the Twenty-first Century 25

Gendered Time 27

2 Work-time Reduction in the US 31

Citizenship, Leisure, Education, and Health 34

From Haymarket to Henry Ford 40

Work Sharing and Fair Labor 51

Two 30-hour Experiments 57

Conclusion 63

3 Current Trends 65

Annual Hours 66

Weeklsß