Pregnant at Work: Low‐Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal InjusticeBy EliseAndaya, New York City, NY: New York University Press. 2024. 208 pp.
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice is a clear, concise, and compelling ethnography of pregnant service workers in New York City.Based on pre-pandemic research conducted at a public safety-net hospital ("Beaumont Hospital"), the book examines what Andaya terms "struggles over time," tracing the frictions that emerge between gestational time, clinical time, and the time discipline of low-wage service work.As such, Andaya offers a careful analysis of how temporal governance operates as a mechanism of inequality, producing and sustaining raced, classed, and gendered forms of precarity.While pregnancy and perinatal care serve as the book's central empirical lens, Pregnant at Work is fundamentally an ethnography of time, power, labour, and care.Across three chapters that focus respectively on regimes of labour time in New York City's service sector, conflicts between gestational time and the time discipline demanded by the low-age service sector, and the disjuncture between the demands of clinical time and those of the workplace, she shows how forms of temporal governance reproduce inequalities along the lines of race, class, and gender.That is, she shows how temporal regimes in service-sector labour, clinical encounters, and workplace policy intersect in ways that systematically disadvantage precariously employed women.Her analysis foregrounds how seemingly neutral or benevolent policies and practices-particularly those intended to protect workers-may nonetheless reproduce inequality by privileging certain temporal forms while rendering others illegible.A meaningful contribution of the book lies in its demonstration that existing labour legislation is often designed to protect workers from overwork, whereas for the women who constitute the majority of Beaumont Hospital's perinatal care patients, underwork and temporal unpredictability are more consequential sources of harm.Methodologically, the book draws primarily on interviews rather than extended participant observation.This emphasis likely reflects the practical constraints of conducting hospital-based ethnography among women who are time-poor, have unpredictable work schedules, and are geographically dispersed across low-income neighborhoods of New York City.While the relative absence of sustained observational material occasionally limits ethnographic texture, it does not substantially weaken the book's analytical clarity or argumentative coherence.Instead, Andaya's careful attention to participants' narratives allows her to trace how women themselves interpret and evaluate temporal arrangements across work and care contexts.Chapter two focuses on the temporal governance of clinical care, examining how institutionalized forms of clinical time reproduce racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities.While this analysis is less
Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/maq.70060
Author: Kathleen Rice
Institution: McGill University
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7129351040
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