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The largest occupational group in Sweden, and the most common profession among women, is assistant nurse. It is also a profession where part-time work is widespread, something that has been framed as a gender equality problem and motivated numerous initiatives over the years. This dissertation explores such initiatives and highlights how the conditions for care work and care workers are renegotiated through two contemporary changes in working hours: projects aiming to make full-time work the norm within current work time standards, and temporary experiments with reduced working hours. This is done through an ethnographic study, that consists of interview and observation material, as well as articles in a union member magazine and contextual material. Drawing on discourse theory, the logic of care and distinctions between clock time and process time, I explore underlying assumptions about time, care, and gender equality as well as the governing logics in the projects followed.

The full-time initiative studied at policy level is mainly characterized by what I have named a neoliberal organizational logic, aiming for cost-efficient improvements. Here, clock time is the hegemonic representation of time, and care is constructed as time-bound tasks. A consequence of these underlying assumptions is that the unpredictability and relational dimensions of care work are marginalized. These aspects are however central to staff, whose reasoning is characterized by a logic of care. In their discussions, time is rather articulated as a process and care as a relation. The dissertation shows that the working hours reduction project, supported by special funds and slightly higher staffing, fosters an expanded space for a logic of care. It is described as an improvement for both staff and care users. In the full-time initiatives however, the logic of care is undermined, and wage labour increasingly encroaches upon care workers’ leisure time, leading to resistance. I conclude that gender equality ambitions decoupled from economic prerequisites, risk renegotiating care work in a way that exacerbate precarious and exploitative conditions for employees – all in the name of gender equality.