Fragmented workdays: Split shifts and the boundaries between paid work, unpaid work, and non-work

Beschreibung

Atypical, fragmented, and hybrid work comes in many varieties. In my presentation, I aim to shed light on one particular variety of fragmented work that has received very little attention to date in spite of its severe effects on employees’ lives: split shifts. Split shifts are a working time model in which the workday is interrupted by one or more hours of an unpaid break. This shift-work model is widespread in such sectors as cleaning, elderly care, hotels and restaurants, retail, and transportation. It is used to create employer-centred flexibility and to accommodate customer preferences.
For employees, split shifts can imply long overall workdays involving alternating shifts of paid and unpaid work and multiple travel times. Yet, as opposed to other shift work or on-call duties, the strains and disadvantages connected to split shifts are often not compensated at all, or only very little.
Split shifts can be regarded as hybrid in the sense of blurring the borders between work and non-work. In practice, split shifts are connected to several ambivalences: For instance, split-shift employees are forced to have a break, but this break cannot be spent ‘usefully’ if employees do not have the option to go home. Furthermore, the interruption may be a break from paid work, but in the employees’ lifeworld realities, especially women’s, the ‘break’ is in fact often used for reproductive work. Even if employees can spend their unpaid break at home, they often report that it does not feel like leisure time as they know they will have to get ready and go to work once again soon. Finally, if paid and unpaid work are taken together, split-shift workers may be working from the very early morning until the late evening, but still not have a full-time income, as is often the case in the cleaning and care sectors, where part-time employment, including involuntary part-time, is common.

Zeitraum	14 Aug. 2019 → 16 Aug. 2019
Ereignistitel	WORK2019 – Real Work in the Virtual World
Veranstaltungstyp	Keine Angaben
Bekanntheitsgrad	International