La pointeuse à l’épreuve de la dilatation des temps dans la grande distribution

• Main Author: Nicola Cianferoni
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ADR Temporalités 2021-02-01
• Series: Temporalités
• Subjects: fragmentation of activities; management; retail; time clock; working time
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/temporalites/7685

Managers that do not record their hours are experiencing an extension of working time. However, a study on retail reveals that longer working hours are related to the grocery stores functioning and the coordination of customers’ and goods’ flows. All production activities are fragmented and decentralized in a retail company. Work brought home combined with the accumulated fatigue put families under stress. Thus, the expansion of working time and the fragmentation of productive activities presupposes an unequal division of domestic work between genders and implies a "social cost" in terms of giving up social and family life. While the abolition of the time clock does not appear to be the cause of longer working hours, the absence of a time clock is not without stakes, as that conceals this phenomenon and encourages its internalization by the managers in the form of personal choices. Social constraints are internalized and encourage the emergence of a form of fatalism that seems to be imposed to individuals. We suggest three explanations for this phenomenon: traditional gender ideology, the specific corporate and/or professional time availability for managers, and the structural weakness of trade-unions.