DATE: Sunday, June 15, 1997                 TAG: 9706100419

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY ELIZA WILLIAMS HOOVER 

                                            LENGTH:   79 lines

JOB OVER FAMILY IN ``3RD SHIFT''

THE TIME BIND

When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work

ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD

Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. 316 pp. $22.50.

The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work is painful reading for those of us who believed the balance between work and home would become easier as more women entered the work force and corporations implemented ``family-friendly'' policies to attract and keep these women. Author Arlie Russell Hochschild depicts a discouraging reality in which the family and home are losing to the corporate culture in the competition for women's time and energy.

In her earlier book, The Second Shift, Hochschild, a professor of sociology at the University of California, explored the roles and tensions in homes where both parents work outside the home. Now, in Time Bind, Hochschild focuses on the workplace. What are the forces, she asks, that are causing all workers to work longer hours, to put themselves in ever tighter ``time-binds'' as they attempt to balance the responsibilities of home and work?

Hochschild studies one (unidentified) Fortune 500 company that seems the image of a ``family-friendly'' corporation. She follows individual employees at all levels of the company, at home, as well as at work. As she does so, she discovers reasons for the intensifying ``time bind.'' There is little practical support for such policies as flex-time, job sharing and part-time work by those responsible for implementing and supervising such policies. And the number of hours actually spent on the job is still viewed as a major measurement of commitment to the company.

Companies have developed powerful tactics to guarantee the time, energy and loyalty of their workers. Expert organizational psychologists now assist corporations in creating ``company cultures'' where workers feel affirmed, part of a company ``family,'' fulfilled and productive. People go to work, not only for job satisfaction, but to discuss problems with caring friends, to feel a part of a community, to sense a shared common purpose.

When this corporate culture is compared with the beleaguered home situation, where diminishing time and energy result in an ever-increasing sense of frustration and guilt, where irritable and resentful children spend as much as 10 hours a day in day care, it is little wonder that overwhelmed parents escape to it. The job becomes a haven. Work becomes home; home becomes work.

Adding to the burden of the second shift (the responsibilities of home and family) Hochschild now describes a ``third shift,'' the time necessary to repair the damage to children and home by the increasing imbalance of home and work lives. According to Hochschild, women still shoulder the primary responsibility for the second shift, and now are assuming responsibility for the new third shift.

Hochschild does a thorough and extremely readable job of examining forces in our work/home culture. Her focus is particularly on homes with children, where the pressure is the most severe, and she laments the critical impact on those too young to have a voice in the organization of our culture.

I wish she had addressed in more depth the vacuum created by the disintegration of historic values of neighborhood and community, a vacuum eagerly filled by a skillfully managed company culture. This problem affects not only employees coping with young children but people for whom money and professional success are no longer issues. It is far simpler to adopt values, priorities and goals handed out by a corporation, or even a cult, than to engage in the difficult struggle to develop one's own meaningful values, goals and priorities by which to live. I am reminded of Dame Rebecca West's description of the German people after the first world war: a people wanting a father figure, someone to tell them what to believe and how to live.

After this absorbing depiction of our work/home culture, we are left to reflect on Hochschild's quote from the woman who headed up the company's Work-Life Balance Program: ``No one ever said on his death bed, `I wish I'd worked harder at the office.' '' MEMO: Eliza Williams Hoover, an attorney, mediator and writer, lives on

the Eastern Shore of Virginia. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Arlie Russell Hochschild is the author of ``The Second Shift.'' She

describes a third shift in ``The Time Bind.''

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