This ad amplifies an issue raised by Arlie Russell Hochschild in The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (1998). Not just working women, but working fathers as well, are prone to feel guilt about being away from their children, but they also feel guilt about being away from their jobs, or letting down an employer. The AT&T ad ostensibly addresses the structural conflict that Juliet Schor refers to as the "time squeeze." But if we superimpose Hochschild's interpretation over this ad, we might see the guilt relationship in another way as well.

Why do employees experience a "time squeeze"? Until recently, corporations presumed a world where men's careers mattered and women stayed home to keep house and raise kids. But that world has begun to change, and if the corporation Hochschild studied is representative, the time squeeze is no longer due solely to the company's failure to appreciate the squeeze placed on working women. Even though the corporation she studied had flexible hours (including jobsharing options and part-time arrangements) and family-friendly policies, she found that both ambitious employees seeking promotions, as well as lower level, and hence more easily replaceable workers, tend not to take advantage of these options. The ambitious understand that time spent away from work can diminish their chances of advancement in rank and salary. At the other end of the job spectrum, less skilled workers have job security fears that are not entirely assuaged by the firm's policies.

Hochschild found people electing not to cut back their work schedules, spending less time with their families, rather than more. Working parents in dual-career families have been spending more and more time at work - not necessarily because they face ever growing work loads, or even because they're afraid of losing their jobs (though certainly in a downsizing environment that fear cannot be ruled out). Hochschild suggests they're fleeing the pressures and uncertainties of home life and escaping to work, where they can feel in control, or at the very least avoid the emotional dramas played out at home. Hochschild reports that though they later tend to feel guilt about this method of avoidance, working parents sometimes prefer the social side of the office to the boredom of household chores, to quarreling or whining kids, or to confronting unresolved emotional conflicts at home.

Hochschild sees the "time bind" as a chain of relationships. Corporate employees may feel a need to spend more hours at work to support their families. This, in turn, prompts increased stress at home, which many parents react to by finding reasons to spend still more time at work to escape the tension at home. These self-contradictory relations contribute to what Hochschild terms the "third shift" -- the time parents spend repairing the damage generated by their compulsion to work. This dynamic is probably not new to the 1990s, but rather endemic to the social and cultural contradictions generated by middle class socialization practices which demand both a commitment to self-achievement and an ideological commitment to the goals of familial intimacy. These don't necessarily fit together, and Hochschild calls attention to what most middle class ideologues would prefer to repress: employees frequently choose to work because they find it more rewarding than time spent in the emotionally messy arena of family life.