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——李蕾
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弹性工作之谬
作者：Sarah Stoller
译者：王宇琪 & 李 蕾
校对：张煜成
编辑：徐 炜
The flexible work fallacy
弹性工作之谬
Breaking free of the 9-to-5 was originally a feminist project. So how did it become part of oppressive 24/7 work culture?
从朝九晚五的生活中解放出来原属女性主义者的诉求，但它又是如何被压抑的24/7工作文化收编的呢?
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. She had a clear view of Google’s 14-storey European headquarters. ‘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. ‘It’s flexible all right, but you’re working 60-hour weeks.’
作为二十世纪英国最重要的弹性工作制活动者之一，阿德里安娜·博伊尔(Adrienne Boyle)凝视着她位于都柏林历史悠久的码头区的船屋窗外，谷歌14层楼高的欧洲总部清晰地耸立着。2017年12月，她对我说：“那里根本没有什么弹性工作！彻夜灯火通明，甚至周六晚上11点。时间倒是灵活，但你每周要工作60个小时。”
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. 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. 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. 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.
早在2020年疫情使远程工作成为必要之前，英美员工就表示，他们希望在工作地点和时间方面有更大的弹性。盖洛普(Gallup)2017年在美国进行的一项民意调查显示，51%的员工愿意换一份能让他们在一定程度上掌控自己时间的工作，35%的人愿意换一份地点灵活的工作。虽然工作弹性最初联系于女性协调有薪工作与无薪家务的要求，但它已成为了所有员工理想福利清单上的一个关键项目。21世纪，弹性工作文化在那些将工作生活平衡、家庭和睦和员工健康等理念作为指导原则的大型科技公司达到了巅峰。
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. Flexibility can make it hard to draw boundaries around paid employment, and difficult to disaggregate work from the rest of the day. Nor has flexibility at work solved the pressing problems of child or eldercare, or shifted the gendered division of housework. 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. 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.
然而，即使是那些享受着弹性工作制的员工——他们仍然是享有特权的少数——也发现，这并不一定意味着他们的工作生活变得更容易或更好了。弹性使人们很难划定有偿雇佣的界限，也很难将工作和一天中的其他时间分开。工作上的灵活性既没有解决照料老人小孩的紧迫问题，也没有改变家务劳动的性别分工。虽然像谷歌和脸书这样的公司喜欢吹嘘他们的员工福利，但他们仍未解决员工的育儿问题，也仍未让每个人都能享受到福利。由于新冠疫情，数千万人的日常工作生活发生了突如其来的变化，这也使“弹性”工作在不同环境下的差异愈为戏剧化：解放了一些人，也囚禁了一些人。
Modern-day flexible work policies didn’t arise in a sudden moment of crisis, but from the slow burn of second-wave feminist activism. 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. 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. A new generation of activists pushed for changes in the structure and conditions of paid work. 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. Meanwhile, men would be urged to share more fully in maintaining home and family. Feminist activism for what we now call ‘flexibility’ was part of a vision for remaking communities and supporting the needs of workers as whole human beings. This is most apparent in the first-hand testimony of the women who dedicated their energies to reimagining paid work at a time when the 9-to-5, 40-hour working week was the near-universal model for professional success.
现代的弹性工作政策并非诞生于突发的危机时刻，而是在第二波女权主义运动的星星之火中出现苗头。20世纪70年代，尽管越来越多的女性进入了有偿劳动力市场，但她们仍然不成比例地投身于育儿和家务劳动。而在美国和欧洲突然出现的意识觉醒的运动团体中，女性越来越认识到那些“仅仅”属于个人的感觉实际上是政治性的。新一代的活动者推动着有偿工作结构与环境的改变，以使它更符合有照料义务的工人的需要，并使所有背景的女性都能与男性平等地参与经济活动。与此同时，男性将被敦促更充分地分担家务和家庭责任。女性主义倡导的我们现在所说的“弹性”，是重塑社区、支持全体工人需求的愿景的一部分。在朝九晚五、每周工作40小时几乎是职业成功的普遍模式的时代，那些投身于重新规划有偿工作制度的女性为上述观点提供了力证。
In the decades since feminists first challenged the structures governing paid work, the vision at the heart of their campaigning has been lost. While employers have adopted some feminist ideas for reforming the workplace, for the most part they’ve strategically bracketed the question of who ends up looking after the children. Ironically, piggybacking on feminists’ ideas about transforming paid work has done more to contribute to a 24/7 work culture than it has to opening up new options for women. Only by looking back at the earlier ideals that structured flexible employment policies can we recover a richer sense of what it might mean to imagine a future that works for us all.
自女性主义者首次挑战有偿工作的支配结构以来的几十年里，作为其运动核心的愿景已不复存在。虽然雇主们采纳了一些女性主义思想来改革工作场所，但在很大程度上，他们战略性地排除了最终由谁来照看孩子的问题。具有讽刺意味的是，女性主义者改变有偿工作的观点，更多被利用于促进24/7工作文化，而非为女性开辟新的选择。只有回过头审视那些制定弹性工作制的早期理想，我们才能恢复一种更丰富的感觉，以想象一个益于我们所有人的未来可能意味着什么。
Born in 1946, Boyle is one of eight children in a working-class family in inner-city Dublin. By the late 1970s, she had become involved in a range of radical activities in London, where she’d come to study. When she completed a community work qualification in 1977, she was a single parent, and looking for part-time employment. But she couldn’t find any, and faced the reality of taking on unskilled work.
波伊尔于1946年出生在都柏林市中心的一个育有八个孩子的工人阶级家庭。在20世纪70年代末伦敦学习期间，她参与了一系列激进活动，并于1977年完成社区工作资格认证。那时身为单身母亲的她四处寻找着兼职工作，却一无所获，不得不接受非技术性的工作。
Within the year, Boyle was meeting regularly with a small group of women in the front room of her housing co-op to think through what could be done. Inspired by an organisation called New Ways to Work in San Francisco, they formed the Job Sharing Project to advocate for allowing two people to formally divide a full-time position.
在这一年里，波伊尔定期在她的住房合作公寓前厅与一群女性会面，思考该做些什么。受到旧金山一家名为“新工作方式”(New Ways to Work)的组织的启发，他们成立了“工作分担计划”(Job Sharing Project)，倡导允许两个人正式分担一份全职工作。
This was all unfolding in the crucible of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, as women in the US and Europe pushed for fundamental reforms to relationships – intimate, professional and political. Some unions and employers in the US and Britain had toyed with flexible work in the 1960s, as a way of allowing professional women to remain in the paid workforce after having children. By the mid-1970s, research emerging from the European Economic Community suggested that flexible hours was the single measure most likely to improve women’s professional opportunities. Meanwhile, a new tide of grassroots social pressure for women’s rights was sweeping both Europe and the US. It was in this context that feminist activists first explicitly connected flexible work practices to the hope for a more equal society.
这一切都发生在上世纪70年代妇女解放运动的大熔炉中，当时美国和欧洲的女性推动着对各类关系(包括亲密关系、职业关系和政治关系)的根本性改革。在60年代，美国和英国的一些工会和雇主曾敷衍地考虑过弹性工作，作为允许职业女性生育后继续从事有偿工作的一种方式。到70年代中期，欧洲经济共同体(European Economic Community)的研究表明，弹性工作时间是最有可能改善女性职业机会的唯一方法。与此同时，一股要求妇女权利的社会底层新浪潮席卷了欧美。正是在这种背景下，女性主义活动人士首次明确地将灵活的弹性工作与对更平等社会的希望联系起来。
The 9-to-5 working week accommodated most men just fine but was inherently at odds with providing childcare
朝九晚五的工作制对大多数男性来说包容度较高，但在本质上却与儿童看护需要格格不入
The postwar expansion of higher education created a large cohort of women with professional training and new aspirations to pursue fulfilling careers. By the 1970s, rising costs of living and wage stagnation meant that a single male-breadwinner income was becoming insufficient to support a whole family, and ever more women started jobs in order to make ends meet. Between 1951 and 1971, the percentage of married women who were in the workforce went from 22 to 42 per cent. This only continued to increase in the 1980s and beyond. By 1989, among two-parent families, 57 per cent were dual-income.
战后高等教育的扩大造就了大批受过职业培训的女性，她们有了追求事业成就的新抱负。到了20世纪70年代，生活成本的上升和工资水平的停滞使得一个男性抚养者的收入已经不足以支撑整个家庭，越来越多的女性开始工作以维持生计。1951年至1971年期间，已婚女性的就业比例从22%上升至42%，而这一比例在上世纪80年代及以后才继续上升。到1989年，57%的双亲家庭具有双收入。
As women came together in activist groups, they reflected on the struggle of combining paid work with care work – what was named ‘the second shift’. Over the course of the 1970s and ’80s, feminists advocated for the introduction of flexible hours, for telecommuting, and for ideas such as ‘term-time working’ and ‘job sharing’. They hoped that these new policies would increase equality in employment opportunities for women, overturn the gendered division of labour at home, and challenge traditional views about paid work.
当妇女们团结于活动群体时，她们反思了协调带薪工作和抚育工作所面临的困难，后者称为“第二轮轮班”。在70年代和80年代，女性主义者提倡采用灵活的工作时间、远程办公以及“定期工作”和“工作分担”等理念，希望通过这些新的政策增加妇女就业机会的平等，推翻家庭中的性别分工，并挑战关于有偿工作的传统观点。
The programme was at once pragmatic and utopian. The idea was to open up part-time employment in a theoretically limitless range of professions. Job sharing would mean fewer hours and the chance for mothers to remain in paid work without a loss of benefits or status. At the same time, it would challenge the hegemony of what activists saw as a 9-to-5, 40-hour working week – which accommodated most men just fine but was inherently at odds with providing childcare.
这个计划既是实践的，又是乌托邦式的，其想法是为了在理论上开放各种职业的兼职可能。工作分担将意味着更少的工作时间和让母亲们继续从事有薪工作的机会，而不会失去福利或岗位。与此同时，它也将挑战被活动家们视为霸权的朝九晚五、每周40小时工作制——它对大多数男性都很好，但在本质上却与儿童看护需要格格不入。
While advocates of job sharing were largely white, middle-class women with higher education, they knew that job sharing couldn’t be a panacea for all workers – above all those who needed a full income. But the idea reflected the utopian conviction that job sharing would encode work, and by extension society, with an entirely new set of values. Job sharers could not be ‘egotistical or possessive’, as Pam Walton, a city planner and early job-sharing activist, put it – their responsibilities would demand teamwork and downplayed egos. Job sharing favoured what were traditionally seen as ‘feminine’ values such as collaboration, listening and sharing. It also promised to be what Boyle and Walton termed a ‘more social way of working’. Activists imagined that remaking work culture would transform work for all.
虽然工作分担的倡导者大多是受过高等教育的中产阶级白人女性，但她们知道，工作分担不可能是所有工人的灵丹妙药——尤其是对那些需要全职收入的人。但这一想法反映了一种乌托邦式的信念，即工作分担能将一套全新的价值观融入工作，进而融入社会。正如城市规划师兼早期的工作分担活动者帕姆·沃尔顿(Pam Walton)所言，分担工作的人不可能是“自私或占有欲强”的——他们的责任要求团队合作、淡化自我。工作分担更推崇传统上被视为“女性”的价值观，比如协作、倾听和分享，它还将成为博伊尔和沃尔顿所说的一种“更社会化的工作方式”。活动者们曾设想，重塑工作文化将改变所有人的工作方式。
In addition to pushing for reforms to the structure of paid work, feminists campaigned for workplace nurseries. As the postwar British state scaled back its support for childcare, growing numbers of working mothers found themselves in a bind. Feminist groups such as the National Child Care Campaign continued to demand state-backed childcare throughout the 1980s, but many activists had resigned themselves to the reality of more minimal social provision. Instead, they began to turn to employers to provide solutions. This was also the case in the US, where a less comprehensive welfare state meant that activists were accustomed to petitioning the private sector for benefits.
除了推动改革有偿工作结构，女性主义者还针对工作场所的托儿所发起了运动。随着战后英国政府减少了对儿童保育的支持，越来越多的职业母亲发现自己深陷困境。20世纪80年代，“全国儿童保育运动”(National Child Care Campaign)等女性主义团体继续要求政府支持儿童保育，但许多活动人士已经接受了普遍的最低社会补助的现实，他们转而开始向雇主寻求解决办法。美国的情况也是如此。在美国，福利制度不那么全面，意味着活动人士习惯于向私营组织要求福利。
Feminists pushed for nurseries in a wide range of workplaces, from universities to grocery stores. These campaigns recognised that flexibility alone wasn’t enough – particularly for those who wanted or needed to work full-time, or were on low wages. In 1970, Pam Calder, a psychology lecturer at London South Bank Polytechnic, campaigned for a workplace nursery. Although ultimately successful, it took five years to get off the ground, during which Calder struggled to secure reliable childcare. On the day she was due to return to work, when her daughter was three months old, the registered childminder she’d arranged was nowhere to be found. In desperation, Calder left her with a kind neighbour. The arrangement lasted, but this childcare solution was ‘not something that you can rely on as a system’.
女性主义者推动在各类工作场所建立托儿所，从大学到杂货店。这些活动认识到，仅有弹性是不够的，特别是对那些想要或需要全职工作、或者工资较低的人。1970年，伦敦南岸理工学院(London South Bank Polytechnic)的心理学讲师帕姆·考尔德(Pam Calder)发起了一场争取工作场所托儿所的运动。尽管最终取得了成功，但它花了五年时间才开始起步，在此期间考尔德为安全可靠的托儿服务颇为挣扎。在女儿三个月大的时候，她要回去工作的那天，她安排的注册保育员却不见了踪影。绝望中，考尔德把她留给了一位好心的邻居。这种安排延续了下来，但这种育儿方案“不是如一个体系一样可以依赖的东西”。
Whether in favour of employer-led or community childcare, activists were motivated by a shared vision – a belief that childcare services should be available to all; should bring together diverse groups locally; and shouldn’t be provided by low-income women of colour for the exclusive benefit of middle-class white women. This vision included the hope that childcare and early education would be anti-racist and anti-sexist in its content.
无论是支持雇主主导还是社区托儿，活动者的出发点是一种共同的愿景，即托儿服务应该向所有人开放，应将当地不同群体聚集在一起，不应该由低收入的有色人种妇女为中产阶级的白人妇女提供服务。这一愿景包括希望儿童保育和早期教育的内容是反种族主义和反性别歧视的。
While first introduced with women in mind, they eventually expanded to include workers of both sexes
虽然最初的理念关于女性，但其将最终扩展到各性别的所有工作者
In practice, using childcare as a vehicle of equality was a tall order in communities and workplaces alike, and white activists didn’t always recognise or address the unique barriers for Black families. Well into the mid-1980s, Black childcare activists highlighted these tensions. In 1985, members of a Black advocacy group within the National Child Care Campaign expressed their feeling that ‘the NCCC is a white organisation and doesn’t appear to think about how other people raise children differently’.
事实上，把育儿作为推动平等的驱动力，无论是对社区还是职场而言都困难重重。白人运动者也无法切实认识和感受到黑人家庭需要面临的特殊障碍。进入到20世纪80年代，黑人儿童保育的运动者们开始强调这其中的紧张关系。1985年，全国儿童保育运动（National Child Care Campaign，以下简称NCCC）中的一个黑人倡导组织的成员们表达了他们的感受：“NCCC作为一个白人组织似乎并没有考虑到他人如何以不同的方式抚养儿童。”
Despite the challenges of building a broad-based feminist movement, by the 1980s feminist campaigns to remake work had gained some traction – particularly in the public sector. In both the US and Britain, employers ranging from school districts to local government councils introduced job-sharing policies. While first introduced with women in mind, they eventually expanded to include workers of both sexes. The London Borough of Camden led the way by introducing extensive parental and family leave, an official job-sharing scheme open to all staff regardless of sex or paygrade, and an onsite childcare centre. The council worked tirelessly, if not always successfully, to see that the opening hours catered to the needs of its workers, and that staff of all income levels and backgrounds could use it. It was these policies, rather than flexible hours or locations, that activists believed were likely to foster a healthier work culture.
尽管在建设一场基础广泛的女性运动需要面临诸多困难，但是20世纪80年代，旨在重塑工作的女权运动已经获得了一些吸引力，尤其是在公共部门。不论是在美国，还是英国，上至政府下至学区的地方委员会都引入了共享工作的政策。尽管起始是维护女性的理念，他们最终还是发展到了涵盖两性的程度。伦敦卡姆登区一马当先，引入了充分了育儿假期和家庭假期，一项面向所有员工（不分性别和工资等级）的官方工作分担计划以及一个办公室育儿中心。尽管道阻且长，委员会依旧在不遗余力地工作，以确保开放时间可以满足员工的需要，同时保证所有收入水平和不同背景的员工都可以享受福利。正是这些政策的实行而不是工作时间、工作地点弹性工作制使得运动分子们坚信能够孕育出更加健康的工作文化。
Well into the 1990s, feminists in the workplace presented flexibility about hours and location as just two of a number of benefits needed to support workers as human beings with lives and responsibilities beyond those furnished (and depleted) by capitalism. In 1999, the Leeds Animation Workshop – a British feminist film collective – released the film Working with Care that featured the fairytale story of a queen and her staff. As a benevolent ruler, she guaranteed all royal staff not just flexibility regarding hours and work locations, but also access to onsite child and elder care, a company laundry, cafeteria, gym, massage centre and union office. The workplace resembled a town with the needs of its community firmly at its centre.
直到20世纪90年代后期，职场中的女权主义者才将工作时间和工作地点的灵活性视为支持工人作为人去生活以及责任所需的诸多复利中的两项，这些显然是在资本主义提供（和消耗）范畴之外的。1999年，一家名为利兹动画工作坊的英国女性电影团体上映了一部名为《小心工作》的电影，讲述了童话故事中的女王和她的员工的故事：作为一名仁慈的统治者，她不仅保证了多有皇家员工在工作时间和工作地点上的灵活性，同时还保证了他们能够在工作场合获得儿童和老人看护的服务，使用公司洗衣房、餐厅、健身房、按摩中心以及工会办公室的权利。工作场所俨然就是一个以社区需求为中心的城镇。
Beyond progressive pockets of the public sector, the history of evolving Anglo-American employment practices was a rather different one. Public sector policies to support the needs of workers with caring responsibilities were made possible by the largesse of postwar economic growth. But over the 1980s, economic stagnation and cuts to the public sector ensured that progressive workplace innovations largely fizzled out.
除了公共部门取得的进步之外，英美雇佣制度演变的历史大相径庭。战后经济的大幅增长，使得支持有照料职责员工需求的公共部门制定的政策变得可能。但是在20世纪80年代，经济停滞以及对公共部门的费用削减导致进步的工作场所创新基本上都以失败告终。
It was now the private sector that took up the baton of structural workplace reform. Major American and British companies ranging from American Express and Rank Xerox to the NatWest bank and Sainsbury’s supermarket implemented so-called ‘family friendly’ policies for the first time. In under a decade, private companies had begun to actively compete with one another to be perceived as having the best benefits for workers with families. But what looked at first glance like a resounding feminist victory was, in practice, a pared-down compromise.
现在，私营部门结果了工作场所结构性改革的接力棒。从美国运通（American Express）、兰克施乐（Rank Xerox）到西敏寺银行（NatWest bank）和塞恩斯伯里超市（Sainsbury’s supermarket），美国和英国的大公司都首次实行了所谓的“家庭友好”政策。在不到十年的时间内，私营公司也开始积极地互相竞争，希望自己被认为是拥有对有家庭员工最好福利的企业。乍一看这似乎是女权主义的一次彻底胜利，但实际上却是一种缩减了的妥协。
The private sector’s openness to rethinking women’s work was far from automatic. Rather, it depended on the tireless, concerted efforts of feminists pursuing organisational change. In 1978, the academic Margery Povall received funding from the German Marshall Fund of the US for a project to stimulate affirmative action for women in Europe. She spent a year embedded at NatWest in Britain. There, Povall tried to push back against the assumption that women always wished to stay at home once they’d had children, and emphasised what the bank itself would gain by retaining trained female employees. But she faced an uphill battle with company managers.
私营行业对女性工作问题的反思绝非自愿。相反，它依赖那些致力于追求组织改变的女权主义者孜孜不倦的努力。1978年，学者玛芝莉·伯瓦尔（Margery Povall）接受了来自美国的德国马歇尔基金会（German Marshall Fund）的资助项目，该项目旨在激励欧洲女性的平权运动。她花费了一年时间扎根于英国的国民西敏寺银行。在那里，伯瓦尔试图驳斥女性一旦有了孩子就总是希望待在家里的假设，并且强调了保留受过培训的女性职员对银行本身的好处，但是她也面临着与公司经理们的艰苦斗争。
It took her a long time, Povall told me in an interview, to see that ‘these men didn’t realise what a married career woman was’. She frequently found the process exhausting and depressing, yet it was also galvanising: ‘Interviewing managers turned me into a feminist.’ By 1981, Povall had persuaded the bank to introduce one of the first maternity-leave returners schemes in the UK. But her further recommendations – including flexible hours, onsite childcare and parental leave for men and women – made little headway.
在一次采访中，伯瓦尔说到她花费了漫长的时间才明白“那些男性完全没有意识到已婚职业女性是什么”。这个过程往往令她感到疲惫和沮丧，但同时也鼓舞人心：“采访经理们的经历让我变成了女权主义者。”1981年，伯瓦尔说服银行引入了英国首批产假回归计划中的一类。但是她的进一步建议——包括弹性工作时间、办公室育儿以及男女产假都收效甚微。
Nonetheless, feminists redoubled their efforts to engage with the private sector. As many activists struggled to keep afloat financially, working with the private sector also presented advantages. What started life as explicitly Left-political activist groups – including the Job Sharing Project – reconstituted as politically neutral non-profits. In 1980, the Job Sharing Project took the name New Ways to Work, in parallel with the US organisation that had inspired it, and transformed into a consulting body that worked with the private sector. While trying to remain connected to their political vision, feminist charities such as New Ways to Work sought to capitalise on the sustainability and credibility engendered by the 1980s boom in business consulting.
尽管如此，女权主义者还是付出了双倍努力与私营企业交涉。由于很多活动人士在财务上难以维持生计，与私营部门的合作也为他们带来了好处。最初作为明显左派政治活动家团体的组织—包括工作分担计划—被重组为了政治中立的非盈利机构。1980年，工作分担项目（Job Sharing Project）更名为新工作方式（New Ways to Work），并行于推进该项目的美国机构，转型成为一家与私营企业合作的咨询机构。诸如新工作方式的女权慈善机构在努力与自己的政治愿景保持契合的同时，也在试图利用上世纪80年代商业咨询业务热潮所带来的可持续性以及可信度。
Activists had long suffered from a blind spot when it came to the realities confronting low-income women
在低收入女性所面临的现实问题上，倡议者们长期以来都存在盲点
At the same time, private-sector employers in Britain were growing nervous about demographic shifts that would lead to a declining pool of traditional recruits. Policymakers began to talk about a ‘demographic time bomb’, the result of the sharp birthrate fall in the late 1970s on the tails of the growing availability of birth control and the legalisation of abortion. The worry was that, by the mid-1990s, this would produce a precipitous decline in school-leavers entering the labour market. As a consequence, the need to recruit and retain female staff assumed a degree of urgency. Progressives seized this opportunity to advance feminist ideas about restructuring paid work – but, crucially, they also absorbed some of the private sector’s own interests and ways of framing the problems.
于此同时，英国的私营企业雇主们也越来越担心人口结构的变化会导致传统招聘人数的减少。政策制定者开始讨论“人口定时炸弹”的发生，这是源于上世纪70年代末，随着节育方式的普及和堕胎合法化，人口出生率急剧下降。人们担心，到20世纪90年代中期，这将会导致进入劳动力市场的毕业生人数急剧下降。因此，招聘和保留女性工作者迫在眉睫。进步人士抓住了这个机会，提出了重组有偿工作的女权主义观点--但是至关重要的是，他们也吸收了私营企业自身的一些利益以及重建问题的方式。
In their collaboration with businesses, activists started to shift their focus from utopian ideas about job sharing and mothers’ needs to the benefits of flexibility and the needs of workers generally. By framing demands in terms of the needs of both male and female workers, activists could push back against the trivialisation of the flexible-work agenda. This allowed them to overcome many of the obstacles Povall had faced a decade earlier, and to shape a new ‘business case’ for flexibility. Yet activists walked a fine line between appealing to the corporate bottom line and maintaining an explicitly feminist agenda. Flexible-work activists had long suffered from a blind spot when it came to the realities confronting low-income women – a myopia that was only exacerbated by the private sector’s near-exclusive concern with retaining the most highly paid, skilled women staff.
在与企业的合作中，活动者们开始将他们的注意力从工作分担以及育儿需求的乌托邦想法转移到了灵活工作的益处以及员工的普遍需求上面。通过基于男性和女性员工的需求来决定需求，活动者们得以对弹性工作制度的轻视进行反扑。这帮助他们克服了波瓦尔十年前的诸多障碍，并且为灵活性塑造了一个崭新的“商业案例”。然而，活动者们在迎合公司底线和维护明确的女权主义议程之间划定了一条微妙的路线。在低收入女性所面临的现实问题上，倡议者们长期以来都存在盲点-私营企业们切实关心的还是留住薪酬最高、技能最佳的女性员工-而这种情况无疑会加剧这种短视。
Companies soon discovered that flexibility, along with basic maternity leave and provisions for returning to work after a baby, served their own financial interests. Greater flexibility about when and where white-collar workers did their jobs didn’t noticeably affect staff productivity, quality or efficiency. At the same time, flexible policies allowed companies to portray themselves as ‘progressive’, and so to appeal to the increasingly economically significant group of professional women workers. It’s telling that the same organisations that were enthusiastic about the introduction of flexible work nonetheless tended to reject onsite childcare. A handful of companies did create nurseries for staff from the late 1980s, but this was the exception to the rule. The vast majority rejected it as simply too expensive; instead, they followed the lead of American Express, and set up childcare information services for parents. These involved directing parents to resources, but otherwise outsourced all responsibility to the families themselves.
企业们很快就会发现，弹性工作制以及基本的产假和产后重返工作岗位的补贴，都是符合公司自身的经济利益的。让白领在工作时间和工作地点上拥有更大的灵活性，并不会对员工的生产力，质量或者效率有多大影响。于此同时，灵活的政策将企业塑造成为了“进步派”，从而也迎合了在经济上日益发挥重大作用的专业女性员工群体。非常能说明问题的是，那些热衷与引进弹性工作制的组织，往往也倾向与拒绝办公室育儿。从上世纪80年代开始，确实有少数公司设立了托儿所，但是也仅仅是例外情况。绝大多数的企业拒绝接受这种做法，认为成本过高；取而代之的是，他们跟随着美国运通公司（American Expres）的脚步，为父母们提供了育儿信息的服务。这些措施包括了引导父母寻找资源，却将所有的责任都丢给了家庭本身。
Nonetheless, many private sector companies began disseminating a triumphant narrative of healthy, happy workers in appealing, accommodating environments. To some degree, feminist organisations facilitated this image. Beginning in 1990, the Working Mothers’ Association – a charitable advocacy group for the interests of working parents – began to host competitions for Employer of the Year, designed to ‘encourage employers to adapt corporate culture to fit in with the needs of working parents’. These publicity events cast a spotlight on organisational change, yet the vast majority of working families were left with few, if any, new benefits or forms of tangible support, even as the number of dual-income households continued to climb.
尽管如此，许多私营企业开始宣传一种胜利的说法，宣称员工在有吸引力的舒适环境中就会健康并且快乐。在某种程度上，女权主义组织具象化了这种形象。从1990年开始，一个为维护在职父母的利益而设立的名为职业母亲协会（Working Mothers’ Association）的慈善团体开始举办年度雇主大赛，旨在“鼓励雇主调整企业文化，以适应在职父母的需要”。这些宣传活动让人们关注到了组织变革，然而尽管双收入家庭的数量在不断攀升，但是绝大多数的工薪家庭几乎没有获得新的福利或者实际上的的支持。
The rationale that guided the corporate embrace of new employment policies was largely detached from feminist visions for a more equal society. It’s unsurprising, then, that the private sector embraced feminist ideas and language selectively. Yet it wasn’t the case that feminism was simply eaten alive by a new corporate capitalist culture; rather, feminist activists and organisations actively worked in and through the private sector to shape what became the status quo. If new policies weren’t everything that activists had hoped, the introduction of some kind of flexibility felt like a step in the right direction.
引导企业接纳新就业政策的理由，在很大程度上脱离了女权主义者们追求更加平等社会的愿景。因此，私营企业有选择地去接受女权主义思想和语言也就不足为奇了。然而，女权主义并没有被一种新的企业资本主义文化所吞噬，相反，女权主义者和组织还是在私营企业积极地工作，并且试图通过这种方式来重塑现状。如果新政策并不是那些活动者们所希望的样子，那么引入某种弹性制度就像是朝着正确的方向迈进了一步。
Over the past 40 years, flexibility has allowed some, primarily white, middle-class workers to have greater control over their working lives. It’s had transformative effects for professional women in particular. The need for parental leave and other forms of support for workers with family responsibilities is now well-established in both the UK and the US, if not yet in organisational practice.
在过去40年内，弹性工作制让一些以白人为主的中产阶级对自己的生活有了更大的控制权。尤其对职业女性产生了变革性的影响。在美国和英国，对有家庭责任的员工提供育儿假和其他形式支持的必要性已经确立，尽管还尚未在组织实践中实现。
But now that we’re squarely in the 21st century, perhaps we’re finally turning a corner, and recognising that flexibility alone isn’t an adequate wellbeing safeguard. For one, the blindness of the original feminist flexible work campaigns to the needs of low-income workers and their families has become more glaring than ever. For shift workers who are required to work flexible hours in the service sector, it’s stable scheduling, not greater flexibility, that’s most needed. As the 2020 pandemic has shown, working from home, or with flexible hours, isn’t always possible or necessarily even desirable. Women still end up bearing the bulk of the care burden. A wider rethinking of work and its place in our lives is overdue.
但是现在，我们已经完全进入到了21世纪，或许这是迎来转机的时刻，仅仅认识到弹性工作制不并是一个足够的福利保障。首先，女权主义最初的弹性工作运动对于低收入员工及其家庭的需求视而不见，这一点比以往任何时候都更加突出。对于那些被要求弹性工作时间的轮班工人而言，最需要的就是稳定的时间安排，而不是更大的灵活性。正如2020年新冠大流行所展示的一般，在家工作或者弹性工作制并不总是可能的，甚至不一定是可取的。妇女仍需要承担大部分的育儿负担。我们或许早就已经对工作以及它在我们生活中的地位进行更广泛的反思。
Since the turn of the 21st century, theorists and decision-makers tend to reflect on the tension between work and family through the lens of ‘work-life balance’. For Boyle, the concept seems very middle-class and not particularly radical. As she told me from her boat, pointing at those beavering away in Google’s offices: ‘They shouldn’t be working long hours and then be so exhausted that they can’t go and enjoy other things.’
进入21世纪以来，理论家和决策者倾向于通过“工作与生活平衡”的角度来反思工作与家庭之间的紧张关系。对于博伊尔来说，这个概念似乎非常中产阶级，并没有那么激进。她在船上指着那些在谷歌办公室里埋头苦干的人对我说：“我们不应该工作太长时间，然后累的无法去享受任何其他的事情。”
Moving forward arguably requires a new language that isn’t centred on mothers, or parents, or even family-friendliness or work-life balance. What ties communities together isn’t employment but, first and foremost, the bonds of care. The future of work must involve a reckoning with our collective responsibility for and to our children, as well as the elderly, the sick and other vulnerable but vital members of our society. Moreover, it must be a vision that grasps these responsibilities not solely in terms of labour but as encompassing a range of human values.
前进需要一种崭新的语言，它不以母亲或者父母为中心，甚至不以家庭友好或者生活与工作平衡为中心。把集体联系在一起的不是就业，而是重中之重的关怀的纽带。工作的未来必须考虑到我们对与儿童、老人、病人和我们社会中其他脆弱但是又至关重要的成员的集体责任。此外，它必须是一种不仅在劳动方面，并且包括一系列人类价值方面去把握这些责任的远见。
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本文原载于 Aeon
原文链接：https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-flexible-work-turn-from-a-feminist-ideal-to-a-trap
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