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families; family time is a finite resource and parental labour market attachment is dependent .... Commission (2007), It's About Time offering the plainest example.
CONTEMPORARY FAMILIES, CARING AND TIME: UNDERSTANDING THE ‘FAMILY TIME ECONOMY’ JaneMaree Maher1, Jo Lindsay2 and Suzanne Franzway3 1. Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University 2. Sociology, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University 3. School of International Studies, University of South Australia [email protected]

ABSTRACT

Time is critical for paid work and family life. In this paper we examine the available evidence on changing family and work patterns and argue that the relationship between decisions about work and care, gender expectations around care and the effects of family policy need to be analysed with attention to available family time so that the time costs and burdens of work and care decisions can be more fully understood. We suggest that framing this analysis in terms of a family time economy will provide important insights into how families are negotiating the increasing paid employment of women while continuing to provide care for children, especially when time changes in social care structures like school and childcare, and men’s unpaid care are very limited.

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INTRODUCTION

Time is critical in both the domain of paid work and the domain of family life and the growth in women’s paid work is posing particular challenges for contemporary Australian families; family time is a finite resource and parental labour market attachment is dependent on time available in the context of family life. Understanding how different families are providing care for dependent children as family breadwinning patterns are changing requires more sophisticated and nuanced investigation of how the time for care and the time for work, and care transitions are being managed. We propose that a focus on a family time economy, the amount of time within the family and the administration and use of that time, allows a more nuanced investigation of family experiences of work and care, the transitions between work and care and the gendered allocation of time within families. Family time economies are shaped by the broader policy landscape and the Australian economy as well as families themselves. Craig and Bittman (2005) argue that ‘it is possible to use an economic framework to study the use of time because time is a finite resource’ (2005: 1), but that we must understand the range and complexity of the time effects of family care work. In Australia, as in other Western economies, measures to support families to reproduce and care for children while maintaining labour market attachment have been on the national agenda for some time (McDonald, 2001). Recent governmental investigations have recognised that maintaining and growing levels of women’s workforce participation is crucial for Australia’s long-term future (HREOC, 2007; House Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, 2006). Australian mothers, like mothers in all other developed nations (Bianchi, 2000), have been the largest growing group entering into the labour market over the past thirty years. Recent ABS figures indicate that more than 50% of mothers with dependent children are in the workforce in total; once children are of primary school age, the percentage rises to 64% (ABS,

2006). Despite the lack of paid maternity leave in Australia, lower wages for women, tax disincentives to work and high childcare costs, the entry and participation of mothers in the workforce continues unabated. New industrial conditions have clearly presented opportunities for mothers, (De Vaus, 2004), yet analysis of men’s caring labour suggests slow growth (Craig, 2005). Clearly, neither men’s care in couple households nor formal child care structures are filling the gaps created by the women’s increased paid work. Here, we consider how time within families is being managed and argue that the concept of a family time economy facilitates a more nuanced investigation of important intersecting social issues around family time, work and care.

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DISCUSSION NEW WORK, NEW TIME: CONCEPTUALISING MULTIPLICITY OF TEMPORAL SCHEDULES

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A decisive element of sustainable work/family integration in contemporary Western societies is the management of time across two spheres with different time schedules. The globalised, round-the-clock economy has generated the need for more flexible work schedules to supply labour market demands across the Western world (Presser, 2003). In Australia, moves towards industrial de-regulation have impacted on standard work schedules with a significant proportion of the Australian workforce working longer and less predictable hours (ABS, 2006; OECD, 2003). Many of these new schedules have developed in the feminised services sector, which relies on women’s increased workforce participation. The reformation of the standard working week and the growth of part time employment has been critical in delivering a platform for women’s workforce participation, but as Whitehouse as cautioned, it ‘may also represent little more than a form of numerical flexibility for employers and trap women with children in relatively low skill non-career sectors of the labour market (2002: 384). Whether this flexibility is beneficial for women workers or not, it has presented important challenges to traditional work/life boundaries and for family time schedules. There is evidence that atypical work schedules (Relationships Forum Australia, 2007), grandparental care (Goodfellow & Laverty, 2003) and other informal care as well as part time work for women are all mechanisms used by families to create care time structures that allow for dual attachment to the labour market. But changes to work schedules have not been reflected in changes to other social institutions critical for families. Care for young children has multiple time dimensions; some are relatively time inflexible. Supervision, feeding, washing and facilitating education are continuous and nonnegotiable. Some fixed care needs are governed by external schedules, like school hours, whilst other fixed needs such as sleeping and eating may be negotiated within families. Even outsourced care requires time to manage and organise as well as time devoted to the paid work that funds it. It is clear that the need for more flexible work time has not been matched by the development of more flexible care time. School and child care schedules remain largely unchanged leading to fixed time pressures for individual families involving transport, informal care structures, the provision of out-ofschool hours care, and the management of casualised work schedules. Parents face ‘collisions between the time orders of the school and of their places of employment … [where] fragile arrangements may fall apart’ (Thorne, 1999: 8). In these changing family time economies, the increase of women’s paid employment is the most important factor (Broomhill and Sharp 2004). The consensus is that women have been required to manage the clear time deficit inside working families; Baxter (2002) argues that there has been a consistent decline in the amount of time that women spend on domestic labour, with any relative increases in men’s unpaid labour being primarily linked to this reduction rather than to any sustained and systematic increase in men’s unpaid work. ‘Women [still] do about two thirds of the childcare tasks,

at least three quarters of the routine everyday indoor housework tasks, and spend about three times as many hours as men on the latter’ (2002: 419). There is persistent evidence that men with young children continue to work longer hours outside the home than men without young children (Craig, 2005), resulting in the paternal wage premium identified by Whitehouse (2002). There is very low availability, and low take up of any form of paternity leave (EOWA 2006) and Hook (2006), analysing data on men’s unpaid care work in 20 countries, argues that the time Australian men devoted to domestic labour and childcare rose from 91 minutes in 1974 to 127 minutes per day in 1992. This increase can in no way match the time taken out of the domestic sphere by women’s paid work in that same period.

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GENDER AND TIME USE IN FAMILIES AND AT WORK

Broomhill and Sharp (2004) conclude from their overview of labour market change in Australia that the Australian gender order is in transition. In their view ‘a variety of alternative models of breadwinning’ have emerged (2004: 18). We do not yet have a clear picture of the extent and shape of those alternative models or how they are impacting on the gendered use of time within families and in relationship to the labour market. The analysis of Broomhill and Sharp, however, indicates, these gender order changes are being experienced very differently in different Australian families according to class and socio-economic positioning. In more affluent families, women’s paid work time may be producing more symmetrical gender relations around work and care (2004: 11), but this shift is not uniform and requires careful consideration. Generally, gender differences in work time and care time persist and appear more entrenched in Australia than equivalent OECD countries. Craig and Bittman (2005) offer a careful analysis of the increased temporal workload in families with children, with the redirection of time towards children and paid work away from leisure and other forms of social commitment, but they also point out that women’s time commitments cover almost all of this additional time in almost all family forms (2005: 16). Overall, Australia has a ‘lower maternal employment rate consistent with more traditional family models’ than many other industrialized nations (OECD 2002; Whitehouse & Hosking 2005). This indicates persisting traditional models of family care and, in regard to working hours, a traditional family time economy, where women provide most of the hands-on care time required for children. While women’s leisure time reduces and work time increases, women’s child caring time has remained consistent (Craig, 2005). This suggests that women are carrying most of the burden of renegotiating family needs and employment with women often experiencing ‘a skewed allocation of paid and unpaid work within their households’ (Morehead, 2005: 5). There are some signs that both women and men are seeking temporal changes that better reflect new generation parenting expectations and work aspirations. Men’s unpaid work time is increasing internationally (Hook 2006) and some Australian time use studies suggest men’s childcare time specifically is increasing (Broomhill and Sharp 2004). Baxter (2002) has identified a slow incremental shift in men’s caring labour, not consonant with women’s workforce participation, but evidence nonetheless that men are moving into the care time gap. Family breakdown leads to new patterns of care although it seems that shared care between fathers and mothers occurs for only a relatively small percentage of children (De Vaus, 2004: 240). As Qu and Weston observe, paid work is a critical aspect of family care (2005) – as important to a family’s well-being as the provision of hands-on care. Women’s greater access to this form of economic caring, as well as changes to men’s labour market participation, is having complex effects on gendered time within households. Bittman argues ‘the need to fill this information gap has become much more pressing at this time of radical legislative reform’ (2005: 60). Australia is undergoing a second wave of industrial reform which, like the first wave occurring in the late 1980s and early 1990s, will have significant impacts on working flexibility, working time and working schedules. A more nuanced family time economy approach that investigates family time and work time together, and ensures a range of different family and work time patterns are included, will be necessary to gain insight

into these changes to gendered time use and their intersection with patterns of labour market participation and attachment. We propose that a new conceptual framework that examines work, care and social policy as shifting domains within the constraint of available family time is vital. We consider that exploring the family time economy where the administration, negotiations around, and use of available family time for care and paid work are closely examined, will assist us to more fully understand family time decisions around care and work. A situated analysis of family time economies could assist understanding of the ways in which families assign time to each of these spheres, allow for interpretation of differential gender and class outcomes implicit in specific family policies, and generate data to support effective family-friendly policy development. It could assist policy makers to address the gap identified by Craig and Bittman (2005) around time committed to caring as the main activity and the amount of time committed to caring as a secondary but interlinked activity – they suggest the time of ‘childcare has been significantly underestimated (2005: 2). Thinking in terms of family time economies allows us to examine complex family processes at play simultaneously rather being limited by ‘circus imagery of individual performers “juggling” and “balancing,”’ that dominates much work and family research (Thorne 1999).

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CONCLUSIONS UNDERSTANDING THE NEW FAMILY TIME ECONOMY

Time for work and care has been identified as critical to the national interest in recent Australian social discourse with the recent report of Human Rights Equal Opportunity Commission (2007), It’s About Time offering the plainest example. In a landscape of changing work patterns and gendered care patterns, it could be argued that time has become an increasingly scarce and valuable family resource. How couples sustain their relationships, negotiate gendered time patterns for paid work and sustain the care needs of young dependent children are all central concerns in contemporary Australia, not only for the families themselves, but also for governments and for employers faced with significant labour market shortages. In order to support families (particularly in the areas of fertility, family stability and provision of care) and labour markets simultaneously we need to examine how the expansion of paid working time and the new frameworks for the management of family time are reshaping contemporary families. We need more integrated and located knowledge about how different families are absorbing and reallocating work and care. As Broomhill and Sharp have noted, ‘understanding of the impact of restructuring in the “public sphere” of paid work will be very limited without an equal focus on the profound changes simultaneously occurring in the “private” spheres of the household and gender arrangements’ (2004:13). The family time economy provides a conceptual tool for exploring work, care and policy that locates these interconnected elements within available family time and may help move us better understand the decisions women and men are making about time for work and care.

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REFERENCES

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