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TITLE:
Now Serving Advancement Possibilities: The Time-Pressured Work and Family Lives of Middle-Class Managers of Fast-Food Restaurants

AUTHOR(S):
Julio Juan Cammarota

DOCUMENT TYPE: Article

*Julio Juan Cammarota is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Working Families and a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Working Paper No. 12

ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the cases of five fast-food managers, focusing on the challenges of mobility in the secondary job market and how the weekly time commitment of fifty to sixty hours of management work, which often extends workweeks to six days, places pressure on family life. Despite these challenges and time pressures, the fast-food managers remain positive about the firm and advancement possibilities within it. This paper takes up the question of why these managers would tolerate unfair labor conditions and remain reluctant to challenge the family/work “time bind” and money squeeze in which the firm has placed them (Hochschild 1997). Their primary responsibilities of making customers and workers happy and advocating the potential for advancement tend to repress grievances against the firm’s intention of getting the most labor out of them for as little cost as possible. Bounded by the possibility of a promotion, managers are also averse to blaming the firm for exacting significant time costs in exchange for their higher salaries. The wait for potential possibilities urges them to offer present sacrifices for a future still unknown to them. They may talk about various financial challenges or time constraints and the toll these take on family life, but they fail to identify that the firm’s low cost labor strategy is responsible for their difficulties and the delay in achieving a better life.