How we use our time is fundamentally afected by the temporal parameters of work. Yet there is nothing natural or inevitable about the way we work. As we saw in chapter 2, the idea that labor is measured and regulated by linear clock time is a relatively recent feature of industrial societies. The quest for maximum speed and eficiency, the disciplined and frugal use of time, only became hegemonic in a market economy where time is money. Fewer workers clock in and out of their jobs these days, but the logic of industrial time still ticks away, shaping how we understand our lives.
At one level, the most straightforward way to alleviate time pressure would be to reduce working hours. We only need to remind ourselves of the long, grinding working hours of previous eras to see how far we have come. Hours of work per person fell rapidly from 1870 to 1930, and Keynes assumed that this fall would continue. The establishment of the standard eight-hour day and the five-day week in the decades after the Second World War was a landmark achievement of twentieth-century social democracy.
However, this trend to shorter working hours has stalled and, for some, it has gone into reverse. In How Much Is Enough?, Robert and Edward Skidelsky take up Keynes’s challenge and puzzle over why: “we in the rich world are four or five times better of on average that we were in 1930, but our average hours of work have fallen by only a fifth since then.”4
Their explanation for the continuation of long working hours is twofold: a capitalist economy gives employers the power to dictate hours and terms of work, and such an economy inflames our insatiable desire for consumption goods. At its root, however, our addiction to work and hyperconsumption is due to the disappearance from public discussion of any idea of the good life in which leisure would be valued for its own sake. The sociologist Juliet Schor similarly puts a new allocation of time at the centre of Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth.5 Like the authors above, she rails against the long-hours culture, limitless growth, and overconsumption. According to Schor, we need to revalue well-being, as millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives: “they work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in trafic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time.”
Chapter seven
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