The Impacts of Worktime Control in Context

This article examines the relationships between workers’ controlover their working time and their well-being, looking at how these relationships differacross a set of health care occupations that are stratified by class, gender, and race(physicians, nurses, emergency medical technicians [EMTs], and certified nursingassistants [CNAs]). Across occupations, workers’ ability to control their schedulesdecreases their job-related stress. The results show that different dimensions ofworktime control (WTC) affect workers in different occupations in distinctive ways,offering a corrective to prior work that combines workers who occupy different locationsin the system of social stratification. Among nursing assistants—the most sociallymarginalized group in the study—the relationships between particular aspects of WTC andjob stress were distinct from those associations among the other three occupations,reinforcing the importance of examining these relationships in occupationally specificcontexts. This kind of comparative perspective illuminates the ways distributions ofintangible resources such as WTC both emerge from and reinforce existing patterns ofsocial stratification. The implications of these differences for research and policy arediscussed