Conflicts are thus installed and to be met with almost everywhere. Between the time systems fixed by the market and the state, there are grey areas in which the working time of the black economy unofficially flourishes in conscious evasion of regulations to protect working hours and of tax laws. In the conflict over the reduction in working hours between employers and trade unions, in which far more is at stake than this alone, it will be up to the social welfare legislation of the state in the end to intervene with regulations. Against the background of the general money preference and the time preferences of male and female employees, highly individualized because dependent on their situation in life, no easily attainable solution emerges. But conflicts also arise in the immediate everyday life of all those who wish for more free time and more possibilities for shaping things at work, in order to attain that 'quality' of time which is intended to convey more autonomy, a reduction of the sense of strain, and more of the ability to structure time into meaningful, coherent units oneself. From an economic point of view, there is the permanent conflict which results from the opportunity costs and manifests itself in the dilemma between 'buying and do-ityourself'. A socio-political conflict of larger proportions, and full of individual tragedy, results from unemployment, from involuntarily produced ‘free time'and the extent to which work can be distributed more fairly'. Also full of conflicts is that area of general welfare in which the market and the state furnish public benefits in education, in health and through social services, which are paid for and for which one has to pay. Without voluntary and unpaid work, and this means the work and time of women, the present standard could not be maintained, however, and it will not be possible to sustain it in view of rising costs in the public sector. Thus it is a question here of the relationship between paid public time and private unpaid time. A separate private sphere, escaping the intervention of the state, no longer exists. And the hypothetical appeal to the forces of the market has been ideologically undermined; it is refuted daily by political reality. Public time has penetrated far into the private sphere, and private time can only be protected if it is made political. This occurs through women making demands in terms of the politics of time, when they insist on a new everyday culture and new everyday rights.1⁵ For in the temporal conflicts of women, all other lines of conflict between market and state, between working time and free time, involuntary and voluntary, paid and unpaid time, are expressed in exemplary fashion. Their conflicts result from the conflictladen experience of a system of society and time, based on the division of labour, in which the time of men was never the same as the time of women. Thus different cultures of time have developed which go far deeper than pragmatic demands or attributed productivity would lead one to expect. The conflict breaking óut here is a struggle for a new culture of time.
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Politics of Time