Pregnant at Work: Low‐Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal InjusticeBy EliseAndaya, New York City, NY: New York University Press. 2024. 208 pp.

Elise Andaya's 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 theoretically innovative than other parts of the book, it serves an important grounding function. By situating clinical encounters within broader temporal regimes, Andaya sets the stage for what is arguably the book's most original contribution: its analysis of how labour rights are interpreted, negotiated, and individualized through moralized discourses of care. The most compelling aspect of Pregnant at Work is Andaya's theorization of what she terms “personalist interpretations of labour relations.” Rather than understanding workplace accommodations through a language of rights, many of the pregnant workers in the study interpreted flexibility, scheduling adjustments, or tolerance for missed shifts as evidence of whether supervisors “cared” about them. As Andaya succinctly writes, “The language of care was a powerful idiom through which they articulated their perception that their persons, time, and pregnancies were valued—or not” (p. 149). Time emerges here as a key metric through which care is assessed: caring supervisors acknowledge the competing demands of labour, gestation, and clinical appointments, while those perceived as uncaring refuse to recognize these tensions. This analysis offers an important intervention in labour studies and the anthropology of care by showing how rights-based protections may be undermined not only structurally but interpretively. When accommodations are framed as acts of personal generosity rather than entitlements, workers’ sense of security becomes contingent on interpersonal relationships rather than institutional guarantees. In this way, Andaya demonstrates how individualized discourses of care can obscure structural inequalities and limit the transformative potential of labour law. Throughout the book, Andaya is attentive to the specificity of the American context, and she explicitly situates her analysis within the political economy of US healthcare and labour. Reading the book from the perspective of an ethnographer working in a country with universal health coverage, more robust worker protections, and guaranteed paid postpartum leave, I at times oscillated between shock at the ethnographic material and a sense of distance from the book's broader theoretical claims. This is not to suggest that those claims are unconvincing—they are carefully argued and empirically grounded—but rather that their generalizability may be shaped by the particularities of the US environment. At the same time, this contextual specificity is also one of the book's strengths, offering a detailed account of how temporal injustice is enacted within a highly stratified healthcare and labour system. In terms of audience, Pregnant at Work is especially well suited for undergraduate teaching. Its clear prose, succinct chapters, and often-poignant examples make complex structural problems legible, particularly the ways in which systemic inequalities are individualized through moral discourses of good motherhood, responsible labor, and deserving care. At more advanced levels, the book will be of greatest interest to scholars working on the anthropology of time, labour, and care. While more accessible than many medical ethnographies, some of its core concepts—including “temporal governance” and “temporal injustice”—will likely confuse and intimidate healthcare providers and policymakers. Pregnant at Work does not seek to radically transform existing debates in the anthropology of care, labour, or time. Rather, it makes a solid and meaningful contribution to each of these fields by showing how temporal arrangements operate as sites of power, moral judgment, and inequality. In doing so, Andaya offers a valuable ethnographic and theoretical resource for understanding how time itself becomes a terrain of struggle in the lives of precariously employed pregnant workers.