{"id":4598,"date":"2024-03-27T12:31:20","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T17:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/?p=4598"},"modified":"2024-03-27T13:05:37","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T18:05:37","slug":"with-work-time-at-the-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meredith.wolfwater.com\/wordpress\/2024\/03\/27\/with-work-time-at-the-center\/","title":{"rendered":"With Work Time at the Center"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the second in a series of essays I’ve written on time.<\/em> You can view a list of all of them on the first essay<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once upon a time, people lived more by the natural rhythms of seasons, the movement of the sun, and their bodies. There weren\u2019t clocks to tell them when to do things and there wasn\u2019t electric light and heat to make it easy to pretend it\u2019s normal to work in the dark (burning the midnight oil used to be a real thing, and wasteful!). People didn\u2019t live by precise times and society didn\u2019t require the sort of coordination and standardization we have today.  We\u2019ve lived so long with clocks, it can be hard to imagine waking with the sun rather than at a specific appointed number on a clock every day. Clock time might even feel to us a more objective measure of time because it\u2019s what we\u2019ve used all our lives to determine our waking and sleeping, our work time and leisure, and our times to eat and exercise. In reality, it\u2019s the most contrived measure of time, one deeply encumbered by social values and largely designed around economic needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Precision and coordination in measuring time was first used by monks to ensure they were adhering to the proper times for prayer, but even those times often differed depending on the time of year (the position of the sun). It wasn\u2019t until Huygens developed the pendulum clock that clock time came into wider use, but this was also the moment of the birth of industry, which required time discipline, the \u201chigh degrees of standardization and<\/em> regularity and <\/em>coordination\u201d of people\u2019s time (Glennie & Thrift 1996, 287). E. P. Thompson, who wrote the seminal work on the growth of clock time in early modern Britain, writes about how quickly clock time and time as a commodity became the only ways of conceiving of time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for overtime or time-and-a-half. They had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well. <\/p>-E. P. Thompson 1967, 86<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Even in that early-modern era, there wasn\u2019t the sort of standardization of time we see today. The idea of standard times and time zones are a 19th Century invention that wasn\u2019t fully adopted by the entire world well into the 20th Century. Localities used to have their own time — originally determined by the movement of the sun — which was not a problem until the growth of fast transportation and communication technologies made those local differences more glaring and inconvenient. Eventually, Greenwich Mean Time became the standard all were forced to follow, though even now, the main tower clock in Bristol, England has a third hand that denotes their original local time. Like so many things that stand in opposition to nature, clock time became a tool of oppression: \u201cthe Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures\u201d (Zadeh). Barbara Adam (2002), who has written brilliantly on the sociology of time, rightly brings up the fact that those natural rhythms did not cease to exist with the invention of clock time: \u201cYet clock time has not replaced the multiple social, biological, and physical sources of time; it has rather changed the meanings of the variable times, temporalities, timings, and tempos of bio-cultural origin\u2026 Machine time has been reified to a point at which we have lost touch with other rhythms and with the multiple times of our existence\u201d (513-14).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Young doffers in Mollahan Mills<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

At the same time that this was happening, Protestantism was preaching time discipline, with leisure seen as an affront to God, and labor \u201cserve[ed] to increase the glory of God, according to the definite manifestations of His will\u201d (Weber Ch. 5). According to Max Weber, this Protestant ethic has become fully secularized over time, though the fervor behind people\u2019s sense of vocation and the importance of money-making beyond real need still feels almost religious in its fervor:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you ask them what is the meaning of their restless activity, why they are never satisfied with what they have, thus appearing so senseless to any purely worldly view of life, they would perhaps give the answer, if they know any at all: \u201cto provide for my children and grandchildren.\u201d But more often and, since that motive is not peculiar to them, but was just as effective for the traditionalist, more correctly, simply: that business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives. That is in fact the only possible motivation, but it at the same time expresses what is, seen from the viewpoint of personal happiness, so irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse. <\/p>-Max Weber, ch 2.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These forces all helped to place work time at the center of our lives and cement the notion of time as money; two things that have only been further entrenched in our contemporary neoliberal society. Time discipline was originally enforced by managers, but we have seen \u201ca movement away from an outer, visible coercion toward an inner regulation administered by the individual himself\u201d (Rosengren 2019, 622). We are driven to reproduce time discipline ourselves, more by virtue of our own sense of precarity (whether because of the nature of our job, our internal insecurity, or both) and individualistic desire to rise than by specific discipline from a manager. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luckily, some of us are starting to question what is behind all this. While business leaders were promoting the idea of quiet quitting as a dereliction of duty, most of us could clearly see that what they were describing as \u201cquiet quitting\u201d was \u201cjust doing your job.\u201d We\u2019ve been so conditioned to see going above and beyond as the minimum expectation that the idea of doing just what is required of us was seen as tantamount to quitting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been working in libraries for 20 years at this point and I\u2019ve felt over the past thirteen years more overburdened and exhausted than I did in the preceding seven. The pace of work feels like it\u2019s accelerating. And I could assume that it\u2019s just me and aging and the fact that I\u2019ve been a parent for all of those latter years, but the literature suggests that this goes far beyond my individual experience. We\u2019re being asked to do more than ever before. As a liaison librarian, I remember reading New Roles for New Times<\/em><\/a> a decade ago and thinking how difficult it would be to develop expertise in all of the listed areas. Since then, we\u2019ve been asked to become experts in even more, like AI, algorithmic bias, open educational resources, and more. And we\u2019re also subject to more interruptions than ever before (as Lennertz and Jones; Bossaller, Burns, and VanScoy; and Nicholson all highlight). Bossaller, Burns and VanScoy (2017) found that the librarians they interviewed \u201cexperienced time famine, time pressure, time poverty, and time fatigue\u201d (15). Even if you\u2019re not working more hours, the feeling that you can never catch up, that you\u2019re drowning in to-do\u2019s can have a significantly negative impact on your mental health and relationships (Giurge, Whillans, and West 2020). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve seen the argument made that since people aren\u2019t actually working that much more than they did 30 years ago, this stress is of their own creation, but I take that claim about as seriously as the claim that people just aren\u2019t as \u201cresilient\u201d as they used to be. There are systemic changes that some are trying to frame as individual changes to get us to grind harder. I\u2019ve written in the past about the normalization of overwork<\/a> and Brons, et al. (2022) have written about how precarity helps to further entrench overwork as the norm. Mazzetti, Schaufeli, & Guglielmi (2014) demonstrated that while there might be personality characteristics common to workaholics, the greatest determinant of overwork is the organizational climate. When overwork is seen as the minimum expectation and it is rewarded with promotions and raises, it becomes the base expectation. Yet the research on the negative long-term effects of overwork is unequivocal:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overwork refers specifically to the cumulative consequences of operating at \u2018\u2018overcapacity.\u2019\u2019 Additional hours spent at work eventually creates fatigue or stress so that the worker\u2019s physical or mental health, well-being, health, or quality of life is not sustainable in the longer run. Adverse effects of excess work on various indicators of worker\u2019s well-being from individuals and families to employers and the (national or global) economy have been fairly well established empirically.<\/p>-Golden & Altman, 65<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Our organizations are short-sightedly running their employees into burnout or worse when a sustainable pace would likely provide better long-term outcomes for the organization (and the individual!). <\/p>\n\n\n

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Messrs. Penn and Son’s Works, Greenwich and Deptford: The Scrap Forge<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Urgency is also a huge part of the timescape of libraries. Lennertz and Jones (2020) write about a study that \u201cfound greater urgency in the university than the factory\u201d which surprises me not at all. I think that\u2019s become true of a lot of knowledge work-type jobs. I\u2019ve seen libraries go through multiple overlapping cycles of \u201ccrisis\u201d and what Meyers et al. (2021) refer to as \u201cthe exceptional present\u201d in order to create urgency and pressure us to overwork. Because when there\u2019s a crisis, we all need to step up and do our part. But what if we\u2019re just in a constant state of crisis? It seems like there\u2019s always another reason to step up and do more and its treated like a temporary blip. I remember for years at the past two libraries I worked with, we kept putting off major departmental planning until things settled down because we felt we were always in reaction mode. But things never settled down at either library. And being in a constant state of crisis and urgency eventually wears you out and numbs you. We can\u2019t operate in reactive mode forever; it\u2019s just not healthy for us as individuals or for the organization. It makes thoughtful and inclusive planning impossible. And urgency has been called out as being a characteristic of white supremacy culture<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s also this feeling that we need to keep growing and building limitlessly; there\u2019s no vision for what enough might actually look like. I remember years ago when I first became an instruction head, my boss asked me to have as an annual goal to increase instruction sessions by 25%. A daunting task, right? Well, through quite a lot of outreach and the generosity of my fellow instruction librarians, we actually met that goal! Woo hoo! But to my surprise, my boss wanted me to put the exact same metric into my goals for the following year. This time I objected. The first reason was because we had a lot of folks who were new to or were uncomfortable with teaching and it made a lot more sense to focus that year on the quality of our teaching than the quantity (because who cares that you\u2019re teaching a lot if your teaching is not effective? We\u2019re not made of magic). But her request also made me wonder at what point would we be teaching enough? What was the magic number? Would I be expected to increase the number of classes we taught endlessly? And how would we manage all that teaching (and outreach!) with already full workloads? Our profession is incredibly bad at defining what enough looks like and I think it\u2019s a key reason why we constantly add new projects and services without considering long-term sustainability. We feel like we have to constantly do more and new things to prove our worth, and the worth of the library, and it’s an exhausting treadmill we could run on forever.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Exercise Treadmill Convey Motion.jpg<\/a> by Larry D. Moore<\/a> (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

We talk a lot in libraries about work-life balance, but I\u2019ve come to believe a balance is really impossible if work is always treated as more important than life. Work time dominates and shapes the rest of our time, impacting our wellness and our relationships. Arlie Russell Hochschild (1997) documented how work time encroaches on family and leisure time in her ethnographic research: \u201cthe more its deadlines, its cycles, its pauses and interruptions shape our lives and the more family time is forced to accommodate to the pressures of work\u201d (45). When we are at home, work interruptions (like a quick email or something) are considered no big deal these days, but we\u2019re expected when we\u2019re at work to be 100% focused on work and pretend that we don\u2019t have bodies, caregiving responsibilities, and worries in our lives. We\u2019re expected to shut those parts of ourselves off. But how many times have you checked work email before you\u2019ve gone to work or on the weekend \u201cjust in case?\u201d It\u2019s become totally acceptable for work to encroach on our personal lives, but not the other way around. We take pains to keep our lives from spilling into our work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember when I had a baby and experienced the absurdity of being expected to suddenly show up back at work and do exactly as much as I did before. I was suffering from postpartum depression and both my son and I were dealing with one health issue after another, but the message coming from work and society was that if I wasn\u2019t just as productive as I\u2019d been pre-baby, I was a failure. I didn\u2019t feel like I could ask for help at work because we\u2019re socialized to see that as weakness and asking for preferential treatment. I felt pressure to be perfect at home lest I make some minor mistake that harmed my child\u2019s entire future (the mommy message boards were full of fear-mongering) and to also prove that I could still do all my work, speak at conferences, write book chapters and articles, and do everything at just as high a level as I ever did. It almost killed me. And I truly believe that our culture pushes caregivers to pursue a level of perfection that is unsustainable. I identified so much with this quote from Mitchell, Magnusen, and Hampton\u2019s (2023) autoethnography about burnout:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew that being a single mother made me a liability – at least in a world where capitalism is valued over having an actual life. I say this because in my experience, in academic spaces, it was expected that all employees leave our personal lives at the door. We were strictly meant to focus on work and not concern ourselves with our personal lives once we were on the clock. (166)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We live and work in a society that believes we shouldn\u2019t have bodies, loved ones, or needs outside of the workplace at any time while we\u2019re working. Stuffing those things down while we\u2019re at our jobs tends only to exacerbate those issues. As someone who taught and worked reference shifts with migraines, I can attest that muscling through the pain only made it more difficult to get rid of the migraine once I got back home. I once ended up spending over $1000 and a whole summer in physical therapy (and pain) because I ignored the harm my desk chair was causing me and kept sitting in it for work despite the growing pain in my hips. Yet I blithely let work bleed into my personal life without a second thought and gave so many hours of my personal time to work without thinking about the cost to my well-being and that of my loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Empire State Building, New York<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to write more about things that push us out of sync with work temporality (disability, caregiving, etc.) and more embodied and interdependent ways to be at work in a future essay in this series. We can\u2019t just be floating brains at work with no encumbrances; what makes us great at our jobs is everything that makes us who we are. We are whole people and deserve to be valued for our wholeness. We need to stop punishing people (whether explicitly or through the cultural norms we\u2019ve created) for having needs that may sometimes interfere with work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some might counter with the fact that we have more flexibility at work than ever. Some of us can work from home. Some of us can flex our time to be at our child\u2019s play or our loved one\u2019s medical appointment. We can often work from anywhere we have an internet connection. Workplace flexibility has been touted as being beneficial for workers (especially caregivers and those with illnesses or disabilities), but is usually gamed to benefit the employer. Golden and Altman (2006) and Anttila, et al. (2015) found that workers with more flexibility tend to work longer hours. I\u2019ve certainly seen it myself where those who take advantage of flexible hours to accommodate caregiving needs feel obligated to prove their worthiness by working even more. It\u2019s like how so many child-bearing academics are afraid of accepting a tenure clock extension because they fear they will be seen as weak or their tenure packet judged more harshly (and in many cases, they are<\/em>). I\u2019d imagine that those who do accept the extension feel enormous pressure to prove that they are even more productive as those who do not have such a gap in their CVs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flexibility and our 24\/7 culture combine to create an expectation of constant availability. And the flex tends to be toward work, not toward the needs in our personal lives. We stay late, we check work email at night or when we first wake up in the morning, we do work on our laptops while watching TV with the family and pretend that it\u2019s quality time. Lennertz and Jones (2020) found that the vast majority of library workers have had to do work during vacations, which is patently absurd in a profession where no one is going to die due to our lack of availability. Bourne and Forman (2014) suggest that flexibility won\u2019t help fix work-life balance issues as long as our society continues to value work time and devalue what we do outside of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nothing will materially change until we 1) change the calculus where work is seen as more important than anything else in our lives and 2) resist norms around overwork, availability, and response times. And really, it has to be those of us with the most privilege and job security to fight the hardest to change these norms in our organizations because those working in precarity will not have the safety to do so outside of a union (and even then,<\/em> it can be risky in some orgs). Every time we check our email outside of work hours, every time we \u201cjust finish this up\u201d when we\u2019re supposed to be spending time with loved ones, every time we overwork, we are helping to reproduce the existing norms. I\u2019ve written in the past about uncoupling our sense of worth from our work identity and achievements and I think that\u2019s an important first step toward changing work\u2019s dominant place in our lives. But it\u2019s going to require real collective action and solidarity to change the norms, especially when there\u2019s always the promise that if you, as an individual, work harder, you<\/em> will be rewarded. This monstrous treadmill will never stop unless we stand together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you contribute to work is not the measure of your worth. And it’s certainly not more important than you or the people you love. Can you imagine how things might look different if work were not centered?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adam, Barbara. “Perceptions of time.” In Companion encyclopedia of anthropology<\/em>, ed. Tim Ingold pp. 503-526. Routledge, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anttila, Timo, Tomi Oinas, Mia Tammelin, and Jouko N\u00e4tti. “Working-time regimes and work-life balance in Europe.” European Sociological Review<\/em> 31, no. 6 (2015): 713-724.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bourne, Kristina A., and Pamela J. Forman. “Living in a culture of overwork: An ethnographic study of flexibility.” Journal of Management Inquiry<\/em> 23, no. 1 (2014): 68-79.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bossaller, Jenny, Christopher Sean Burns, and Amy VanScoy. “Re-conceiving time in reference and information services work: a qualitative secondary analysis.” Journal of Documentation<\/em> 73, no. 1 (2017): 2-17.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brons, Adena, Chloe Riley, Ean Henninger, and Crystal Yin. “Precarity Doesn’t Care: Precarious Employment as a Dysfunctional Practice in Libraries.” (2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glennie, P. and Thrift, N., 1996. Reworking EP Thompson’sTime, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’. Time & Society<\/em>, 5<\/em>(3), pp.275-299.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Giurge, Laura M., Ashley V. Whillans, and Colin West. “Why time poverty matters for individuals, organisations and nations.” Nature Human Behaviour<\/em> 4, no. 10 (2020): 993-1003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Golden, Lonnie and Morris Altman. “How long? The historical, economic and cultural factors behind working hours and overwork.” Research companion to working time and work addiction<\/em> Ed. Ronald J. Burke, Edward Elgar Publishing (2006): 36-57.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1997. The Time Bind\u202f: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work<\/em>. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lennertz, Lora L. and Phillip J. Jones. “A question of time: Sociotemporality in academic libraries.” College & Research Libraries<\/em> 81, no. 4 (2020): 701.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mazzetti, Greta, Wilmar B. Schaufeli, and Dina Guglielmi. “Are workaholics born or made? Relations of workaholism with person characteristics and overwork climate.” International Journal of Stress Management<\/em> 21, no. 3 (2014): 227.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meyers, Natalie K., Anna Michelle Martinez-Montavon, Mikala Narlock, and Kim Stathers. “A Genealogy of Refusal: Walking Away from Crisis and Scarcity Narratives.” Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship<\/em> 7 (2021): 1-18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mitchell, Carmen, Lauren Magnuson, and Holly Hampton. “Please Scream Inside Your Heart: How a Global Pandemic Affected Burnout in an Academic Library.” Journal of Radical Librarianship<\/em> 9 (2023): 159-179.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicholson, Karen P. “Being in Time”: New Public Management, Academic Librarians, and the Temporal Labor of Pink-Collar Public Service Work.” Library Trends<\/em> 68, no. 2 (2019): 130-152.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosengren, Calle. “Performing work: The drama of everyday working life.” Time & Society<\/em> 28, no. 2 (2019): 613-633.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thompson, E. P. \u201cTime, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.\u201d Past & Present<\/em> 38 (1967): 56-97.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Weber, Max. 2001 [1930]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York, NY: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zadeh, Joe. \u201cThe Tyranny of Time.\u201d NO\u0112MA,<\/em> (3 June 2021) www.noemamag.com\/the-tyranny-of-time\/.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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