Such arguments for reducing the incentive to work are based on the average number of hours people work. The authors are well aware of the growing disparity between the work rich/time poor and those with few or no hours of work. Indeed, they are motivated by a concern with a fairer distribution of working hours, ending the divide between those who are compelled to work longer than they want, and those who cannot get enough work.6 Nonetheless, their general point stands: the culture of today’s opulent societies is more harried, not more leisurely.
Both books reflect a renewed interest in the politics of working time. I was particularly struck by this, as my own introduction to the issue was via earlier leftist arguments for a leisure society based on afluence.7 By contrast, current critiques of endless growth are inflected by the economic downturn and the need for environmental sustainability. And instead of the socialist glorification of work as the key to collegiality, solidarity and democracy, these authors question our willingness to dedicate ourselves to a life of relentless work. In doing so, they recall ideas of leisure advocated not only by Keynes and his contemporary, the philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay In Praise of Idleness (1932), but earlier by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in The Right to be Lazy (1883).8 Unfortunately, in common with their predecessors, this vision of a progressive politics of time seems only able to invoke a peculiarly bourgeois and suburban ideal of home and family life.
Missing from these attempts to reformulate working hours is any recognition of the gender dynamics embedded in how we think about time and work. A fair distribution of work would need to take into account not only the diferent patterns of employment currently found between men and women, but also the inequitable distribution of unpaid work within households. While the authors above correctly criticize the framing of time in terms of productivity growth for its own sake, they do not question the diferential worth accorded to the public use of time spent in paid work, compared to private domestic labor. Kathi Weeks reminds us that the Marxist productivist paradigm undervalued and rendered invisible the labor time of unwaged housework, caring, and emotional work. A feminist time movement “should attend to the whole of the working day by, for example, insisting that estimates of the socially necessary domestic labor time of individuals be included in both calculations of working time and proposals for its reduction.”9
Finding Time in a D igi tal Age
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