Gendered relations to working time: enterprise bargaining outcomes in acute care and community nursing settings in Australia

Abstract

In this paper we examine the outcomes of the 2001, 2004, 2007 Enterprise Bargaining Agreements between the Australian Nursing Federation (SA) and the South Australian Government with particular focus on union-based strategies for de-intensifying nurses’ labour in the acute and community sectors. Consistent with the theoretical and empirical research on time, the strategies employed in the acute sector reflect rational, linear, bureaucratic, logical and masculinist relations to time through the use of computerised time and task measures. Community sector solutions are characterised by cyclical, messy and highly relational feminised approaches to reducing work intensification. We argue that the outcomes of these two approaches are contradictory. The community-based solution of case management is less successful in reducing workload, but maintains worker control over the labour process, while in the acute sector, the highly Taylorist approach is successful in de-intensifying workload but at the cost of reduced control over the labour processes.