FEATURE ARTICLES WORKPLACE DIARIES FREE ADVICE
STRESS-O-METER SPEAK UP ACTION GUIDE
TITLE Time Bandits  page 3 of 5
SUBHEAD How Work Sneaks Away
with Our Personal Time
AUTHOR Jennifer Vogel & Robin Marks

time bandits



Some Questions About Your Workplace

Speak Up:
Is work taking over your personal life?

And if all that, coupled with lurking fears of being "downsized," doesn't keep us from wanting evenings off and lunches outside of the office, our employers dangle an exemplary employee in front of us: "So-and-so's willing to work hard for us? Why aren't you?"

Somewhere amid all these games, we workers have come to see ourselves, rather than our employers, as the cause of our high-stress working lives. According to a recent interview with Arlie Hochschild, author of The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work in Mother Jones, workers buy into the team-pressure scenario created by employers. "They internalize the speedup; they think their hurry is due to their work ethic." How do bosses do it? Is it magic? Hochschild says they've taken their cues from female relationships. "Corporate engineers have looked at how women are with each other, borrowing the best tips from female neighborhood culture and then transporting them back into the bosom of capitalism. They've feminized capitalism. You have to marvel at such corporate engineering, and then you have to watch it like a hawk because it's stealing family time away from families."

They've also been aided by the deterioration of community in the non-work world; the media feeds us daily tails of murder and mayhem, increases our fears of each other, and job relocation separates us from family and friends. Work seems safe. Besides that, our workplaces give us, or say they give us, the recognition and personal attention we used to get from our loved ones.

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