In view of the powerful temporal structuring of everyday life by the systems of time fixed and governed by the market and state, and in view of the structural changes which are leading industrialized societies out of the machine age and placing them under the temporal regime of the new technologies, it is thus no wonder that the politics of time per se has become a key strategic problem for otherwise very differently structured areas of politics. Changed methods of production and increased international competition demand regulations of time which are as flexible as possible. But new types of question of the distribution of time are also impending wherever the everyday life of women and men increasingly comprises both everyday working life and the so-called private sphere, in which the by no means so private requirements of family life are to be reconciled with the temporal regulations of gainful employment.
The different time cultures in which men and women move, and into which they have been socialized, here increasingly clash. The extended present of everyday life now refers to both sexes, but their time cultures are still differentiated along sex-specific lines. Questions of equality and the realization of social rights arise again wherever the unemployment situation threatens to become endemic, and whenever a not inconsiderable part of the population is not yet, no longer, or only temporarily and marginally anchored in the labour market. A new possessory title arises – the possession of a job; while in its shadow the number of those with no such possessions grows. What superficially presents itself in public as a discussion about a reduction in working hours conceals highly different sets of interests. Conflicts which are still hard to name, because they cannot easily be classified in conventional areas of politics, demand new social feats of integration and above all synchronization for which there are no conventional models. It is as if the machine age had 'flexibly unsteadied' itself, as it is called in the technical jargon for the new automated production technologies. It is as if the 'long arm of the job', which detained workers in physical and mental fatigue and dependence in the evenings and on holidays, and whose far-reaching effects on ways of life shaped by industrial production showed such strong tendencies to persist, is finally preparing to release people from its rigid routine, while the flexibly unsteadied job has not yet fully established itself. In the transitional period, there is a burgeoning, as so often, of the ideal projections and utopian blueprints of a society which appropriates time again', and which is to assure the individual of temporal self-determination. It is obvious that the old exchange relations between working time and free time, which are derived in their construction from the linear and continuous' working biography of the male employee, are no longer true. The quantity of free time cannot be uniformly transformed into the highly differentiated, neatly arranged demands for quality, derivable from subjective situations. Highly different ideas and meanings are subsumed under the concepts of working time and free time. Empirical investigations show that two desires predominate: the desire for a 'normalization' of one's own working time, which arises at the very moment when the supposed 'normal working time'ceases to be the compulsory model for reality; and the desire for 'temporal sovereignty', for the self-determined approach in dividing up and shaping working time in coordination and synchronization with other needs of life.11 If in this connection the temporal conflicts are distinctly more perceptible to women, then it is because they have more powerfully contradicted the still conventional system of time, since their massive entry into working life, with their differently structured temporal needs. The empirical data further show how much more quickly the real working hours change than the ideas about them, but also what facts 'the terrible state of official working-time statistics'is able to conceal: on the one hand, the probably considerable overemployment of a section of employees in the face of a continuous process of structured mass unemployment; on the other hand, a process of unemployment which, according to all available data, is characterized by the cumulative dynamics of distribution of social inequalities in chances and risks of employment.12
Politics of Time
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