The Impacts of Worktime Control in Context

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