Working in a 24/7 economy: Challenges for American families

Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families. Harriet B. Presser. Russell Sage Foundation Publications. 2004. 288 pp. ISBN 0-8715-4670-7. $39.95 (cloth). Reading this book at 30,000 feet over Mexico-before and after interviewing urban families about work/family conflict there-convinced me of the genuine strengths and modest weaknesses of Presser's analysis of American families' nonstandard work schedules. An astonishing 40% of American workers have jobs that regularly include weekend, swing shift, or night shift work. It is not clear how much this number has changed over time or how this number really compares with most of the world's population (other than the obligatory comparison with Europe), but intuitively, Presser knows that the move toward round-the-clock work reflects massive global changes in the structure of and relationship between economies. Her primary focus, however, is not the causes or uniqueness of working Americans' situation, but the effects of nonstandard work schedules on the lives of families. I suspect that parents' tears shed over minimal time with family are similar among urban Mexicans and Americans. But to her credit, Presser does not open with a sob-story interview, but impresses the reader with three exhaustive encyclopedic chapters that draw upon the 1997 Current Population Survey (CPS) labor data. The author extracts from this authoritative-albeit limited-data set some fascinating statistics about who is most likely to have such jobs and how nonstandard work is concentrated in local rather than international services. The 24/7 story appears to be more of a story of local cooks, maids, and waitresses serving other locals than one of "operators standing by" trained to help us hook up our high-speed Internet connections or solve our different computer problems. Wage data from the CPS allow the author to also report systematic evidence of what a late-night taco vender or barista might have anecdotally reported: that generally people do not work nonstandard schedules to enhance their incomes through shift differentials or to solve child-care problems; they work then because the job requires it. (Incidentally, I would like to have seen evidence that she eliminated full-time students from her sample, because a sizeable fraction of young adults are choosing nonstandard low-wage work to accommodate educational activities.) Presser reports that nonstandard work seems especially concentrated among low-wage workers, and repeatedly shows only modest differences across racial, ethnic, and gender categories. She returns several times throughout the book to this subtheme of inequality, pointing out that nonstandard work, as a "problem," is most concentrated among low-wage workers. I would like to have seen this theme brought forward as a major concern and not as subtext. For example, the subtitle talks about "American families," and the jacket cover shows a picture of a professional-class White couple juggling work and family. Presser clearly is worried about the effects of this work on families, and introduces the text with a kind of "social problems" angst that animates the whole book. But the concentration of this problem among the poorest working Americans deserves a more prominent role. This reflects my conviction that the concentration of these "challenges" (as the subtitle identifies them) among the working poor or near poor are more compelling than the less frequent problems of higher social class families with more options and resources for solving those problems. …