Meanwhile, men would be urged to share more fully in maintaining home and family. The idea was to render it more suited to the needs of workers with caring responsibilities and allow women of all backgrounds to participate in the economy on equal terms with men. A new generation of activists pushed for changes in the structure and conditions of paid work. In the consciousness-raising and campaign groups that cropped up in the US and Europe, women increasingly recognised that what felt ‘merely’ personal was, in fact, political. In the 1970s, even though growing numbers of women had entered the paid workforce, they continued to do a disproportionate share of the childcare and housework. Modern-day flexible work policies didn’t arise in a sudden moment of crisis, but from the slow burn of second-wave feminist activism. The abrupt restructuring of daily working life for tens of millions due to the COVID-19 pandemic has also dramatised just how different ‘flexible’ work is in different contexts: liberating for some, imprisoning for others. While companies such as Google and Facebook like to trumpet their employee benefits, they still haven’t fixed the childcare problems of staff, and they still fail to make their benefits accessible to everyone. Nor has flexibility at work solved the pressing problems of child or eldercare, or shifted the gendered division of housework. Flexibility can make it hard to draw boundaries around paid employment, and difficult to disaggregate work from the rest of the day. Yet even those employees who enjoy the benefits of flexibility – and it’s still a privileged minority – have found that it doesn’t necessarily mean their working lives have become easier or better. In the 21st century, flexible work culture has found its apogee in large tech companies that have embraced notions such as work-life balance, family-friendliness and employee wellness as guiding principles. While flexibility was originally associated with women seeking to combine paid work with unpaid childcare, it’s since become a key item on the list of desirable perks for all workers. A 2017 Gallup poll in the United States found that 51 per cent of workers would be willing to change jobs for one that allowed them some control over their hours, and 35 per cent for one in which the location was flexible. Long before the 2020 pandemic made remote work a necessity, employees across Anglo-America said that they wanted more flexibility about where and when they work. ‘It’s flexible all right, but you’re working 60-hour weeks.’ ‘There’s not much flexible working in that one! Lights on all night, 11pm Saturday night,’ she told me, when I spoke to her in December 2017. She had a clear view of Google’s 14-storey European headquarters. Adrienne Boyle, one of Britain’s most important flexible-work activists of the past century, gazed out the window of her houseboat in Dublin’s historic docklands district.
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