Sibylla Bostoniensis

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0.

And only 8 had appointments after regular work hours.

This is a line I previously quoted, originally from an article about how hard it is to find a therapist, in which the investigative reporter called 100 therapists listed as available in an insurance company directory of therapists that took that insurance, to find out how many were actually available.

Take a look at that phrase, "after regular work hours". There's not the least question in anyone's mind as to what the author of that article is referring to. You know exactly which hours are "regular work hours".

Well, who, exactly, works "regular work hours"?

Not the person who takes your order when you go out for drinks after work. Not the person behind the bar mixing your cocktail, not the person who cooks the food. Not the person who cleared the table. Not the person who washed the dishes.

Not the DJ at the club you went to later that evening, or on the weekend, nor the band, nor the stand-up comedian. Not the bouncer at the door. Not the person who took tickets or charged admission. Not the person who cleaned up afterwards.

Not the person who drove the Uber or the cab or the bus you took home. Not the person behind the counter of the 7-Eleven you passed along the way that was still open, or at the service station that would have sent a tow truck if you called for roadside assistance. Not the people who worked repairing the rails and the train cars overnight, so they would not delay commuters – "commuters" – who work "regular business hours", and not the train conductors who have to leave their homes for work when it is still dark so the trains are running to take "commuters" to their "regular business hours" jobs.

Not security guards working overnights, and not firemen waiting in their stations. Not the people in the bakeries making the donuts and the coffee for the morning rush. Not the people who run the presses and deliver the physical newspapers that still hit the curbs at dawn. Not the people who report the 10:00 p.m. news.

Not the people stocking the shelves of grocery stores. Not the people at the registers. Not the people driving the trucks that bring the goods for sale.

Not the people who stand by ready to transport any who need it in an ambulance, to the emergency room where the lights are never turned out. Not the nurse who answers patients' call lights nor the doctor who comes to the bedside in the middle of the night.

Not the people who have to be in the fields by sun up for harvest, or the people who have to see the cows milked. Not the people laboring in factories or mines that run around the clock. Not the soldier at his midnight post, not the sailor at the helm overnight. Not anyone who can be described as working first shift, second shift, or third shift.

In fact, a whole enormous lot of workers don't work during "regular work hours".

You know who else doesn't work during "regular work hours"?

Retirees and people so wealthy they don't need to work at all.

People who are disabled to the point they cannot work and don't have jobs, and subsist on Disability payments. Or who don't get Disability payments, and beg on the streets, or hustle for a survival as best they can.

So who does work "regular work hours"? Who works 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday?
Mostly people who work in offices – not factories or foundries or fields. People who work sitting at desks, not standing at registers or riding tractors or climbing scaffolding. These days, their hands mostly operate keyboards; it used to be pen and paper. Not hammers or welding rigs or mop handles or tomatoes or forklifts or steering wheels.

Overwhelmingly, the people who work the schedule we refer to as "regular work hours" or perhaps "regular business hours", the people who work 9:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday, are white-collar workers.

The expression "regular work hours" only refers to the work hours that are regular only to certain workers.

Which is not to say that all white-collar workers work 9:00 to 5:00 Monday through Friday. The sysadmin installing upgrades in the middle of the night, the librarian keeping the library open evenings, the lawyer and the consultant working 100-hour weeks, the lab tech running cultures round the clock for the ED and the nocturnist she's running them for: lots of white collar workers also work hours outside of "regular work hours".

And, certainly, there are also blue-collar workers who wind up working 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday.

But, overwhelmingly, the people whose schedules are what we call "regular work hours" are white-collar workers.

In our society, we have this deeply ingrained idea of what a normal work schedule is, what the default work schedule is – an idea embedded in the idiom "regular work hours" – which is a work schedule characteristic of a white-collar workers.

Our society takes the white-collar experience (or at least a white-collar experience) as the exemplar of how work is, for all workers – even as, with even a moment's thought, it really obviously isn't.

This is classism. It's not a huge big classism. It's just a wee little one in passing. Calling the default white-collar work schedule "normal working hours" is to social class what Crayola calling a tannish pink crayon "flesh colored" is to race: it's hardly the world's biggest injustice.

But it's certainly indicative, isn't it? It's indicative of how we think – or rather a kind of thoughtlessness. It betrays a bias in how we think that is rooted in certain assumptions about who counts as a person (and who does not) and which peoples' experience of the world is representative of the human experience (and which peoples' don't).






1.

If you're reading this, chances are you are highly aware of the twins scourges of racism and sexism, and you have learned a lot about how sneaky they can be, in the ways they are passed on to us, even against our will, by the culture we soak in, such that we have to work on rooting them out of our own minds, actively, lest we unwittingly let them flourish in our thoughts and attitudes.

Chances are, though, you've done no such work on classism. At least if you're an American (but this is probably not just true of Americans). Social class – as opposed to economic class – is something, as I explained before, we do not talk about in the US, except in the most coded of language. We do not look at squarely in the face, and we do not speak about it plainly. And we most definitely do not theorize it.

And if we do not have a comprehension of class, there is zero chance that we will engage with the issue of classism.

There are two reasons it behooves us to tackle the issue of classism.

The obvious one is that injustice and oppression are, you know, bad. There is a moral argument to not participate in systems of injustice and oppression. And that's a good reason.

But there's another reason, and you may have noticed it becoming a bit of a theme across my writing: prejudice is stupid. I don't just mean that it is illogical to engage in. I mean it makes you more dumb.

Prejudice is not just wrong because it's mean. Prejudice is wrong because it's counterfactual. Allowing yourself to persist in prejudice is allowing yourself to go on believing something that is not true. At best, it is simply negligent, and will leave you trying to navigate the world by a faulty map, scratching your head in perplexity when you find yourself lost or fallen over a cliff. But if one defends the prejudice so that one may go on cherishing it, one has to invest a certain amount of intellectual energy in fending off offending knowledge of how what one would like to believe is true is at odds with the actual truth. As I have written previously, this both saps one's intellectual energy and begins to warp the whole of one's ability to reason; it motivates one to adopt additional counterfactual beliefs to shore up the unsupportable belief one is clinging to. The amount of falsity one is believing in then grows, and continues growing.

Thus the second and to my mind much more compelling argument for working on classism and all other prejudices – arising, as it does, right out of enlightened self-interest – is quite simply so as not to be an idiot.
And, o my readers, I have to tell you: one of the places that idiocy due to unbridled classism and complete cluelessness about class is most flagrantly obvious is in American political discourse.

Particularly on the left.

Obviously, I have no particular interest in helping Republicans and the alt-right be less stupid. But I would like so very much if progressives and the Democrats would stop stepping on their own dicks. In general, of course. But in specific especially in matters of social class. Because social class really matters.

Class and classism are staggeringly consequential in American politics. I am of the considered opinion that a huge amount of why progressivism – a political philosophy organized around making it nicer for people, and that therefore one might reasonably anticipate wouldn't be a particularly hard sell to the electorate – has failed to make an overwhelmingly compelling case for itself to the American people has been because of how utterly daft the left side of the political aisle has been about class and classism.

Prejudice – thus considered as a self-indulgent choice to believe falsehoods one finds pleasant – is properly understood to be a luxury. This particular prejudice is a luxury the American left can't afford a moment longer. Frankly, it's been a luxury the American left hasn't been able to afford for at least fifty years, and that is one of the reasons we are in the fix we are today.




2.

There's good news and bad news here.

You are – as we all are – the beneficiary of more than a century of struggle against racism and sexism. We have had the benefit of more than a hundred years of very, very smart, very, very eloquent people thinking hard about the nature of sex and sexism and race and racism, and uncovering their complexities and manifold manifestations, and explicating them in language ranging from graduate dissertations down to what a small child can understand. We stand on a towering mountain of theory, built up by generations of perspicacity and insight.

Classism not so much. Unfortunately, with class and classism, today we're starting at something very close to sea level.

("Bur, Siderea," I hear someone thinking, "What about Marx?" Remember how I once explained how economic class and social class are not actually the same thing? Marx's system of classes is yet another thing. It is not without pertinence here, but for the time being set it aside. We'll come back and get it later.)

There is much we can extrapolate from what we know about sexism and racism to apply to classism, but we must be very careful in doing so. As I've previously mentioned, different oppressions work differently. You cannot just pick up what you have learned about sexism and racism and slap it on classism and call it a day. Classism works substantially differently than sexism and racism.

Consider this line from a famous document that perhaps you have encountered: "I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group." A very astute observation – but that could only happen because there were so very, very many individual acts of meanness for the subtler phenomena Peggy McIntosh wrote about to hide behind, from interpersonal disrespect right on up to murder.

Sexism is the same: while there are ways in which women and non-men people are disadvantaged through structural and cultural systems, there's also still plenty of unreconstructed misogynists out there who frankly believe women to be inferior to men in a variety of imaginative ways and who act accordingly, ranging, again, from interpersonal disrespect right on up to murder.

Classism is different in that regard. You are far, far less likely to run into someone who consciously holds and openly espouses an opinion of as to the inferiority of people of a certain social class, and expresses animosity to them for their social class identity.

(Which is not to say that virulent, malicious class antagonism isn't a thing, at all. But you can't see it until you see this other thing first.)

Instead, classism predominantly presents as the particular kind of disdain for a people revealed by the little evidences that one doesn't think them worth bothering to think about at all.

Classism – at least as it exists here and now – is primarily characterized not by open spite but the casual, contempt of willful ignorance and insouciant obliviousness.





3.

You've probably already heard the idea that being "race blind" is not actually a good thing, but in case you hadn't, the idea is as follows. Many white folks aspiring to treat people of color justly have seized on the idea that "not seeing race" is the epitome of being just. It is, perhaps, of laudable intent, but the problem is that just because you're not seeing race, doesn't mean that it isn't there – and it doesn't mean it doesn't have its thumb on the scale. "Race blindness" leads to ostensibly well-meaning white people standing around scratching their heads wondering why the Black people have all absented themselves, given that they, the well-meaning white people, had (let us imagine for the sake of argument) all been scrupulous not to treat the Black people any differently than they treated the white people – all the while the Black people were dealing with horrible verbal abuse being muttered at them sotto voce by the not well-meaning white people also in attendance.

Likewise, as I explained in detail in my post on de facto sexism, things can turn out to be sexist not from any animus against women, but just because the modal human was taken to be a man, or simply because decision-makers never stopped to think about how things can be different for women in our society than for men. When everyone is equally provided what a man is assumed to need and no more, toilet paper is given away free in bathrooms, but tampons are not.

Similarly – only moreso – the largest part of classism is class blindness: literally not perceiving class or its effect on the lives of people who aren't you.

Like, for instance, regarding the 9 to 5 schedule of a typical white collar office job as the hours it is regular for people to work.





4.

In case you didn't know – speaking of the classism of obliviousness about other classes' lives – in the US in blue-collar worksites that run around the clock, work is typically arranged in three shifts. While individual employers can vary in what schedule they keep, the typical arrangement for three-shift work is first shift is 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., second shift is 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., and third shift is 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
We can imagine some parallel universe in which the cultural ascendancy of such work led to Americans using the phrase "regular business hours" to refer to this instead.

There are, of course, many other work schedules as well. The schedules of restaurants, for instance, that organize around whichever meal times they serve. Hospital wards, for another instance, are sometimes staffed with much longer shifts than eight hours, to reduce the number of patient handoffs across a day, to improve continuity of care. Many kinds of employers have systems of overlapping shifts – for instance, retail's opening and closing shifts – so that a higher number of staff are present during rush hours.

I'm not going to rehearse all the different kinds of schedules people work to here. My point is to awaken your curiosity about the terms of employment of the people around you – perhaps the people who are not around you, about who you haven't really thought much – not to satisfy it. And, of course, to simply show you what might be a threadbare place in your own thinking: a failure to notice what you had been failing to notice.





5.

Now, I hear someone out there thinking, "Aren't you making a lot out of what's just a turn of phrase? It's just an expression. Is it really classist?"

Well, is the term "chairman" sexist? It's pretty much the same thing.

I'm not asking you to stop using the terms "regular work hours" or "regular business hours" or similar. Not today. But the day may come in the future when we decided it's not such a great idea.

We decided to stop using words with the "-man" suffix for two reasons. One was because that unnecessary gendering of jobs and roles affected how other people understood us when we spoke: to use such gendered terms sounded like one endorsed the idea that these were men's prerogatives. So to speak otherwise was to alter one's language to be welcoming of women (and also, of course, non-binary people, but they were not much on the radar back when this praxis became prevalent) who had stepped into these jobs and roles or might desire to do so. The other was to change how we ourselves thought: by adopting the discipline of using ungendered terms, and self-correcting when one lapsed, one reinforced one's own attitude that women were welcome and even expected in these roles and jobs. It was a thing we did not just to convince others, but to change our own habits of thinking.

Perhaps there will come a time we will look at this term as a relic of a less enlightened era and not want to use it. "Ugh, that's so early 21st century. As if the only workers who counted were those in offices! That must have been before they invented worker solidarity." Perhaps someday there will be a movement to replace it with some more accurate term like "office worker hours" or "standard office hours". Perhaps the day will come when we decide we want to think differently about class and people who are in different classes than our own, and decide one of the ways to do that is to change our language to reflect a more capacious understanding of the diversity of work lives.






6.

And I'm not telling you using the expression "regular work hours" is offensive to people who are not white-collar workers. I don't know. Maybe it is. Certainly, it always makes my internal eyebrow raise when I hear it. But if there is any movement among, say, blue-collar people to object to it, I am entirely unaware of it.

Here's something else we can extrapolate successfully from what we know of sexism and racism: we don't always recognize sexism and racism when we encounter them. When they're baked in to the customs and ordinary ways of behaving and speaking we've grown up with, they don't necessarily register.

At the risk of derailing my own post, a nice example going viral right now is the observation – apparently backed by actual research, but I haven't tracked the cites down yet – that female politicians are more often referred to by their first names while male politicians are more often referred to by their last name, alone. It's been fascinating watching people react, often poorly, to this being pointed out to them. And the reason is obvious: it's a sexist practice they themselves had unthinkingly been participating in, having been acculturated into it growing up in a society in which it is normal. It's embarrassing and even ego-threatening to have it pointed out that something one had done was, without any malice or consciousness of disrespect, sexist. At least it is if you think sexism is wrong and bad and something one should not do. Extra especially if one is, one self, a woman.

And even when we do recognize this sort of ingrained, cultural sexism or racism when we encounter it, we don't necessarily choose to take offense at it. The vice president's campaign is leaning hard into her first name. I don't believe for a second that the vice president is unaware of this differential in how female candidates are referred to versus male candidates. If somehow she hadn't noticed it for herself, at her level I'm pretty sure a professional strategist would explain it to her in discussing various approaches to presenting her to the public. There are a bunch of reasons it might be good PR for her to make her first name part of her brand, but some of those good reasons include, for one thing, the fact we live in the sexist society that has this double standard and trying to buck it would be swimming upstream against the public's expectations, and, for another, by leaning into the practice she can signal subtly, "I'm not one of those kinds of feminist," to set the public at ease that she will not challenge their sexism too much. (Something Obama was a virtuoso of with race.)

I'm pretty sure you could at 10:00 p.m. any evening walk into any factory running a round-the-clock three shift schedule and tell the people working there that sorting out their health insurance will involve calling the HR benefits department "during regular business hours" and none of them will be confused about what you mean. None of them will think that you mean during the fullness of the hours that the plant is operating. None of them will think that you mean the regular hours of their own shift. It's an idiom. They know what it refers to. And I don't expect any of them to think twice about what words you used to refer to it.

And they probably wouldn't get bent out of shape about it if you did.

They don't have to for it to be a problem.





7.

Even if our hypothetical second-shift factory worker did note the classism in referring to HR's schedule, as opposed to their own, as "regular business hours", they'll probably prioritize any irritation at what words are used to refer to lower than their irritation at the thing being referred to: the inconvenience that, while they may be working 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., HR is only open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The people working second shift can't wander down to the HR office on their break the way the folks who work first shift, 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., could. They could maybe arrive early if they want to speak to HR in person. Third shift? They would have to stay two hours late to catch HR as they were coming in.

Of course we might ask why it is that the plant's HR department is only open 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. when the plant itself is open round the clock. But we know, right? Getting to work "regular business hours" is a privilege. A privilege of being a white-collar office worker. Like the people who work in HR. It would be hard to hire HR professionals willing to work outside of those hours, especially overnight.

Despite the fact that some people who work second and third shift prefer it for their own reasons, most people generally find having to work second or third shift, or simply not "regular work hours", as unwelcome and an imposition. There's a lot of things not to like about it. When there are variety of shifts, it's common that working the shift closest to "regular business hours" is a prerogative of seniority: which is to say, a privilege allocated to the more senior employees over the less senior employees.

So one of the reasons HR is not likely to be open outside of "regular work hours" is because they feel entitled not to. It would be giving up a privilege they enjoy having.

The other reason is that it probably never occurred to them to do so. Sure, part of HR's job – the part that has to do with employee benefits, at least – is to provide what we might call some "customer service" to the employees that get those benefits. But – be available to the people they serve when it's convenient to their work schedules? Surely if they're open "normal business hours" then they're as available to the workers who would need to speak with them as could be expected, right?

I'm sure you can think of lots of other reasons, good business reasons, why not to keep the HR office open overnight so that HR is functioning whenever the plant is open.

But I don't actually expect those are the reasons businesses that have plants open around the clock don't also have HR departments open 24/7. It's, quite simply, not conventional to do so, so it's unlikely for anyone to even ask the question as to what the pros and cons of doing so would be.

Don't get me wrong: at least in healthcare, there's a thing where people who work overnight shifts in hospitals say the best to part of doing it is that HR, and the entire rest of the administrative apparatus of the healthcare institution they work for, isn't there then. Plenty of people who work night shift would just as soon HR not be open, and they'll put up with the hassle that anytime they do need to deal with HR, they have to do it outside of their work hours, as a reasonable trade-off. I don't mean to upset that apple cart.

My point is not to argue this is a terrible injustice or it needs to be rectified. It's really to point out the shape of the world that we live in, and the patterns of assumptions that underpin it – assumptions that have to do with class, and which are largely invisible while hiding in plain sight.





8.

It's not just HR departments and factory workers, is it? Anyone who doesn't work "regular work hours" but some other hours finds themselves out of sync, quite literally, with the rhythms of the rest of society.

As in the example of medical professionals eluding administrative oversight by hiding out on the dark side of the clock, there are people for whom that's a feature not a bug. As a night owl, I'll be the first to say the best time to go grocery shopping is 3:00 a.m.: no crowds, no lines, and if you don't see something on the shelves, ask one of the nice people stocking if they have any. But: you're not getting a rain check at that hour, or anything else you have to do at the customer service desk. The customer service desk is closed.

To work hours substantially out of sync with society's idea of "normal" has two importance consequences. One is that, well, it takes a bit more scheduling to do things that are organized for the convenience of people on schedules considered "normal", and you will often necessarily be the party who has to shift accommodate the discrepancy. The bank isn't going to change their hours.

The other is that you will relentlessly bump into an assumption of when you work and how your schedule works, an assumption that will be wrong in your case.

It is an episodic little reminder that your schedule is not the one that society considers normal, that even though you might have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of coworkers working along side you at your job on the very same schedule, even though your schedule might be completely conventional for your entire industry, or entire sector of the economy, that schedule is still considered not normal in this society. That there is an idea in our national culture of what it is to have a regular, conventional, ordinary work schedule, and it doesn't include the schedule of you or anybody else who does what you do for a living. It's the schedule of people who work in offices and sit at desks and dress like the "suits" who are your boss or your boss' boss.

What messages do you think might be absorbed from experiencing this? About relations between classes? About how one can understand one's role in society?

This is two things you probably already have terms for. One is that it's a microaggression. The other is that it's othering.

You are almost certainly already aware, thanks to decades of consciousness raising, that there is a regrettable tendency due to sexism to conceptualize people as falling into two categories: people and female people.

Likewise, you are almost certainly the beneficiary of sufficient anti-racism work to be aware of the parallel phenomenon of assuming, for instance on the internet, people are white unless designated or revealed not to be.
Well, in our society, we have a widespread tendency to think of workers as being either workers or not-white-collar workers.

When white-collar workers are considered the norm, blue-collar workers are othered.

What do you imagine it does politically, for non-white-collar workers to get a subtle relentless message from our culture that they may be here, but they aren't the people this culture is for?






9.

The clinic that I first worked for, coming out of grad school, was open five days a week, from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Upon hearing that, I instantly knew something about the entire population of patients that sought care at this clinic: none of them worked 9 to 5 jobs, that was for sure. And I was right: the clinic largely served the indigent disabled, and when they were employed at all, it was typically on some other schedule.

You know that thing where many schools in the US start around 7:00 a.m. and get out around 3:00 p.m., and that's really inconvenient for child care for families where the parents work 9 to 5, because they're still at work when the kids get out of school? That schedule is approximately first shift. It doesn't match the schedule of white-collar office workers, but it does somewhat match the schedule of an awful lot of people who work in the trades or in factories.

Many towns have noise ordinances that prohibit construction work, landscaping work, or the operation of dumpsters before 7:00 a.m. Seven in the morning is the conventional start of industrial work. That work doesn't start at 7:00 a.m. because that's when the ordinance allows it to, the ordinance is set to 7:00 a.m. because that's when blue-collar jobs conventionally start.

You often can read class in work schedules and schedules that have to do with work. If you know what you're looking at, and remember that class exists, and often mediates when people (have to/get to) work.






10.

Here's the thing about social class: an awful lot of things turn out to be about social class that don't appear to be about social class. Work schedules are but one example.

They're also an interesting example because work schedules are not some apparently-arbitrary class affectation. They're not a hair style or a brand of beer. They derive directly from one's occupation and its conventions and power relations, which in turn are things we're generally more comfortable thinking about class in terms of.

And, yet, nevertheless, the role of class in work schedules, and therefore other things in the schedule of one's life, is something a lot of people – most people? – are oblivious to. I expect this is more the case for people from white-collar backgrounds, who maybe never learned what the shifts of a factory are, or thought about the consequences of being tied to cows' milking schedules.

Like I mentioned: that obliviousness is dangerous, politically. We can't afford it any longer.

Being oblivious to the reality of class does not make class go way. It just makes us hapless and ineffectual, where class is concerned, at best. At worst, it makes us an actual danger to others in a way that tends to rebound as danger on us, by causing us to blithely support policy that will effect other people in ways we did not expect or intend, often to their detriment, but almost always to our own.

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Note: I am screening all comments, at least for now, because my schedule does not allow for me to moderate until late on the evening of the 1st, and discussions of social justice, in general, and classism in particular, have a tendency to go badly off the rails if unattended.

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