Cadena logística

As discussed in chapters two and three, Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) divided strain-based conflicts into work-related and family-related. While work-related strain-based conflict is thought to affect workers in general (Epie & Ituma, 2014), it has been documented that women with family responsibilities experience more family-related strain-based conflict because they are usually the primary caregivers; they care for their husbands, children and other relatives and this strain can sometimes be transferred to team members or colleagues who have to take over their

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responsibilities at work (Beutell & Greenhaus, 1983; Beutell & Greenhaus, 1982).

Running a double full-time shift (family and work) is likely to be a source of strain as argued by earlier research on work and family in Nigeria (Akanji, 2013; Epie, 2010; Okafor & Amayo, 2006). Although there have been some positive findings in existing research around negotiating between family and work (Brough et al., 2014; Carlson et al., 2006; Greenhaus & Powell, 2006), “conflict” has been a recurring theme in the majority of African studies, along with reports upon the health impacts of conflict, such as stress and fatigue (Agarwal, 2014; Agyemang et al., 2014; Akanji, 2013; Annor, 2014; Epie & Ituma, 2014; Mapedzahama, 2014). Working mothers in the study constructed various narratives to portray strain-based symptoms of conflict:

“I know that in Nigeria, there is the challenge for women really…a lot of places don’t realise that women have a cycle. When a woman gets married, the first six, seven years if she starts having children immediately, she needs to have some flexibility. Children may fall sick and there is nothing you can do about it…today one child falls sick… you can’t tell all your children to fall sick at the same. While one is recovering the second one may fall sick (laughs)… and the next thing is that you have to start explaining that the second one just caught his own flu…”

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A typical working day for all the mothers interviewed was hectic: this usually involved waking up early and doing some early morning chores before setting out to work. A working mother (WM 29, Retail department, Multinational Company) who preferred not to have her voice recorded during the interview described her daily work schedule as hectic, where she had to monitor forty stations in Lagos. She was on her feet most of the time because she had to move around a lot to conduct site inspections. In particular, she talked about having developed health problems as a result of her hectic schedule and her daily tasks even led to her changing her choice of shoes, from high-heeled to low-heeled, due to the physical demands of her job. Drawing from discussions outlined in chapters two and three, findings from this study support evidence from both advanced countries (Bartolomé & Evans, 1980) and Nigeria (Stephen, 2014), which show that workers go through emotional and physical stress due to pressures from the home or due to work demands. Other working mothers described similar busy schedules with many deadlines to meet:

“…there is pressure at work. The pressure at work is not much of being on your feet, it is more of being on your computer… especially in operations there is a lot of pressure because a lot of things are tied to operations, you are looking at the facility… even if your boss is going to be sympathetic, you need the plant to be running because that is the heart of the company… So I think that is the added pressure in operations because if there is an issue now and you need to trouble- shoot it and your child is sick, you can’t say ‘can you hold on for one

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day, let me attend to my family’ (laughs)… we are talking of how many million barrels of oil… (laughs)”.

(WM20, Engineer, Multinational Company) The quote above provides further evidence that supports earlier research that the availability of formal (family-friendly policies) and informal support (supervisor and colleagues’ support) to employees cannot in itself reduce WLC if there is no reduction in the targets and workload of employees (Sutton & Noe, 2005).

Although there was a general narrative of hectic work schedules, mothers differed in respect to their frequency. While some experienced stress and fatigue in the daily course of their jobs, others experienced strain at particular periods:

“There are really high peak seasons where it is crazy; it depends on the rig, it depends on the risks and it depends on the problems we are encountering while drilling. It depends on so many things… we know that it is an erratic business; some days are crazy and some days are quiet …”

(WM 24, Procurement, Indigenous Company) Working mothers’ daily routines created an accumulation of stress from combining the responsibilities emanating from two different roles (work and home), as well as that imposed by the environment. WM1, while describing

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how tired she felt at the end of the working day said she usually wished she could rest and sleep. Another working mother commented:

“There was another day that I came back and I was so pissed off and I said, ‘today I am not cooking. Everybody should go and eat bread’. My point is that it is really challenging for the mother.”

(WM 10, Engineer, Multinational Company)

Mothers were asked “Can you describe in one sentence how you feel most times after each day?” All but two working mothers (WM 4 and WM 5) used

words like “tired”, “stressed”, “feeling guilty” and “exhausted”. For those

working mothers who complained about stress, some felt fulfilled despite the stress in their lives, while others portrayed a feeling of guilt after a day’s work. WM 4 also highlighted how she could feel positive about work even in the absence of time for relaxation:

“Working gives me some kind of fulfilment. I am not at home; legs stretched and waiting for my husband to come in… no”

The rigidity of the working schedule within the Nigerian environment leaves little room for flexibility for workers generally. As such this suggests that in addition to the time-based WLC this may cause, it is likely to cause strain, stress and fatigue for these working mothers in Nigeria. This strain is exhibited in narratives describing the early wake up time and late bedtime for working mothers despite the fact that a lot of energy will have been

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sapped while commuting long distances to and from work. Work-related stressors will therefore have a negative effect on the effective performance of the working mothers at home.

It should be noted that despite the pressure at work experienced by working mothers, the role of the organisation in making the negotiation between work and family easier for the employee was acknowledged by many. For example, WM13, a petroleum engineer in an indigenous company talked extensively about a policy that was introduced in her workplace which gave employees five days leave in a year outside their regular annual leave days, to do whatever they considered important. Although respondents acknowledged the role of their employers in reducing the strain through the initiation of a few policies, the fact remains that the majority of mothers still experienced stress from the physical and psychological demands of their jobs (Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985).

Summarily, in line with the literature, unlike in western countries where working women report both work and family-related conflicts, Nigerian women appear not to report high levels of family-related strain based conflict (Annor, 2014, Okonkwo, 2014). This can be seen as one of the differences between WFC experienced by working women in the West and working women in Africa.

In spite of this lack of substantive evidence, the data from this study shows that there are occasional accounts of family-related strain-based sources of conflict. For example, two supervisors narrated their experiences of noticing

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that the productivity of working mothers in their team who were high-flyers were reduced because of family-related causes, such as conflict with a mother in-law, infertility or delaying resumption from maternity leave due to the need to attend to family issues. The next section discusses behaviour- based sources of WLC.