Cultural Narratives on Work and Family in Collective Bargaining Agreements

• In Event: Drivers of Families and Households

Abstract

In this project, I explore how workplaces contribute to and reflect the socially constructed family. Workplace benefits represent efforts, conscious or not, to categorize, normalize, and naturalize behaviors and rules for which there really is no “natural” way of doing things. Thus, benefits are active sites where the boundaries between work and family are continually produced, reproduced, and legitimized. Drawing on a novel corpus of over 19,000 collective bargaining agreements representing a diverse set of industries over time, I utilize qualitative and computational methods to examine how employer-provided work-family benefits determine what is recognized as family; which family activities are afforded respect, rights, and protections; and which people are granted, or denied, those rights and recognition. While data analysis remains underway, preliminary analysis of a subset of police and teacher contracts suggests that the language used to describe workplace benefits in employment contracts largely reproduces and reflects the heteropatriarchal family form. Benefits assume that the family is a heterosexual married couple where one parent is the primary caretaker and the other is the primary breadwinner. The assumption of the heteropatriarchal family form is embedded even in benefits that use more “progressive” and gender-neutral language and framing (e.g., family leave instead of maternity leave). To the extent that deviations from this pattern exist, they seem to appear in feminized industries and workplaces where the employees on the bargaining committee are predominately women. Future work, to be completed before ASA, will extend the preliminary analysis presented in this paper to the entire corpus.

Author

• Tessa Holtzman, Stanford University