The concept of ‘free time'conceals what political options are open. On the market, depending on income, the option arises of buying or of do-it-yourself. Through the universal medium of exchange, money, all allocations of time are left up to the consumers. In the area of state politics, it is a question of working out options which mediate between the politics of living time and the politics of working hours, between the unattainable ideal of lifelong full employment for all and an extremely fragmented employment situation of part-time jobs, in which the employees are at the mercy of the employers without trade union protection and are discontinuously employed. It is a question of finding a balance between the divergent interests and time preferences of women and men, but also between the expanding conflicts of interests of the corporately organized trade unions and the desire of women for more part-time jobs. The questions of the distribution of work and time under discussion here turn out to be difficult in several respects. The status and the rights derived from one's position in the labour market always turn out to be stronger than the universal status of an ordinary female citizen. New difficulties arise from the lack of a generally applicable set of criteria for the quality of the time under discussion. Time is translatable into money, but the same quantity of time means something very different for those who live in different circumstances or who have different possibilities of shaping their time. Viewed in this light, the purely quantitative factor of time stemming from the machine age has been joined by a qualitatively organizational factor, which has long since overshadowed the purely quantitative one. It is one thing to perceive the nature of time, its valency and social setting, in a discriminating fashion; it is another to meet the different political demands on its organizing capacity for coping with everyday life. In both cases, however, time has ceased to be a private matter. What are the prospects of solving the conflicts presented here? In a detailed analysis from the strategic viewpoint of active participants, Helmut Wiesenthal comes to some striking conclusions. Most serious of all is probably the empirically established conclusion that there is no general time preference in the sense that a larger group of employees desires 'more time' and is prepared to sacrifice portions of income for it.30 There are limited time preferences, against the background of a surprisingly broad spread of actual working hours, but they cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Even the influence of monetary trade-offs is limited: almost three quarters of those asked prefer the present relation between time and money. Wiesenthal infers from this an approximate satiation of the relative need for free time. A reversal is possible, of course, but the conditions in which it could occur are narrowing: there would have to be precise objectives like the earlier demand for the eight-hour day; real income would have to rise continuously for a while in order to create the need for more time for spending money; more attractive uses of free time or so-called income-substitute activities, like working in $\mathtt { o n e " s }$ own garden, which presuppose no additional need for income, would have to be offered. This results in a pessimistic outlook for the chances of a re-standardization of the divergent patterns of working time. Since the present initial position of the working-time situation is extremely divergent and unequal, a levelling up could only be carried out via individually specific changes in working time. This, in turn, encounters considerable difficulties. The more concretely the patterns of distribution of working time aimed at are defined, the smaller the segment of employees becomes which sees its preferences realized in them. From the multitude of articulated time preferences, not a single one appears capable of social generalization any more.
Politics of Time
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