2005 University of Michigan Poverty Research Grants
Funded research
Kimberly Clum, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Anthropology.
Flexible Schedules, Flexible Families: The effects of work conditions in less-skilled service jobs on low-income single parent families.
Description
In the debates surrounding welfare reform in the 1990s’, work was cast as an unquestionable goal for low-income single mothers. Proponents of welfare reform construed employment as a crucial means to psychological, social, and moral uplift (if not necessarily economic). Their success in discursively framing welfare reform in this way made it harder to raise concerns about the kinds of demands low-wage jobs place on workers, and the potential personal and social consequences of those demands. Consequently, these issues are only beginning to gain prominence in scholarly and policy literature. My dissertation research examines one area of critical concern related to low-wage work: the effects of work conditions in less-skilled service jobs on the home lives of low-income single mothers.
Less-skilled service jobs commonly require employees to work variable shift schedules. These flexible schedules pose significant challenges for the arrangement of workers’ home lives, particularly for single mothers. For my dissertation, I conduct semi-structured interviews and engage in participant observation to ethnographically analyze how flexible work scheduling practices affect the organization of low-income single mothers’ home lives, the challenges single mothers face in coordinating home lives with flexible work schedules, and the expectations for that coordination within less-skilled workplaces. Employer’s expectations that workers coordinate their home and work lives relatively seamlessly affect evaluations of work performance. Consequently, the ability of low-income single mothers to calibrate their domestic responsibilities to their flexible schedules has significant repercussions for their work outcomes, such as job retention, wage increases, and opportunities for promotion. This dissertation project fills a gap in existing research by providing a rich, qualitative analysis of how low-income single mothers’ paid work experiences impel particular family management strategies and the consequences these strategies then have for women’s work outcomes.
To explore these issues, I analyze low-income single mothers’ experiences at work and home by collecting ethnographic data from both these domains. I use two particular ethnographic methods, semi-structured interviews and participant observation, to collect data from two different service sector workplaces in Southeastern Michigan and from the domestic and community spaces of low-income single mothers recruited from these workplaces. I conduct semi-structured interviews with low-income single mother employees and management recruited from the two workplaces. I supplement this interview data with participant observation data gathered from the two workplaces and from women’s “home” spaces.
Achieving a better understanding of how low-income single mothers manage the coordination of home with these flexible work schedules has both theoretical and policy import. Theoretically, it provides a unique vantage point from which to contemplate the organization of work and labor in a post-industrial context as well as to understand how participation in these forms of work and labor shape workers’ lives.
The focus on low-income single mothers also contributes to vital policy debates surrounding low-wage work and the economic prospects for less-skilled workers in this new economy. The changing nature of the less-skilled job market, combined with policy changes over the past decade, has led to greater economic dependence on these low-wage service jobs among less-skilled workers, especially female less-skilled workers (Henly 2003). Yet, up till now, little consideration has been given to the economic and social costs posed to low-income families by the demands of these jobs. A greater awareness of what is involved in meeting the demands of these jobs could facilitate the development of supports to offset potential costs, if not lead to a questioning of policies that compel low-income women and families to be dependent on these jobs in the first place.
