The powers that be stole our time, says Guy Standing. Now we need to take it back

Time is a precious asset. Yet, for a majority of people, it’s controlled by unaccountable others. It’s clear that time inequality is among the greatest of all forms of inequality, and that inequality is growing remorselessly.

In ancient Greece, time was divided into five types of activity – labour, work, recreation, schole and aergia. Schole encompassed both education and participation in the life of the polis (the city state). Aergia literally meant laziness, or time needed for contemplation. Labour was done by the metics (people employed in menial tasks), banausoi (manual labourers or artisans) and slaves, whereas work was done in and around the home.

It was scarcely an admirable society – anyone engaged in labour was denied citizenship on the grounds that constant manual labour deforms both body and mind (and labourers didn’t have the time to become politically educated). By contrast, a citizen was expected to maximise their time in schole and aergia, along with doing some work and recreation.

Since then, there have been three “time regimes”, corresponding to the main form of production in each era.

In the agrarian regime, time was shaped by a conflict between commoners and rulers. Commoners refers to those people wishing to maximise commoning, that is, shared activities in the commons (the natural resources that are available to all members of a society). The rulers were intent on inducing more people to do more labour. The poor were forced into jobs, aided by the Vagabondage Acts of the mid-16th century. For a first “offence” of idling, the poor were branded; for a second, they were hanged.

As capitalism developed, an industrial time regime took shape, with the emerging working class being dragged into jobs, and having minimal time for anything else. But the division of time into discrete blocks, ruled by the clock, was resisted actively from the Luddites onwards, as well as passively in the spread of mental illnesses, “nerves” and suicides, leading the state to foster psychiatry at the turn of the 20th century.

When social democrats, communists and socialists reacted, they briefly clashed with those such as William Morris who wanted a politics of freedom from labour, freedom to do work combined with real leisure and a revival of commoning. The Left made a huge historical error. They pursued a strategy of universal labour. They wanted everybody to be in decent labour. Gradually, the goal became full employment. What a betrayal.

In the second half of the 20th century, a third regime took shape, which I call the tertiary time regime, corresponding to the conventional division of the economy into primary, secondary and tertiary sectors (where primary is the extraction of raw materials; secondary is manufacturing; and tertiary is the provision of services). Instead of neat blocks of time and place, as in the industrial model, boundaries between all types of activity blur. A resultant irony is that in the process, most people actually have much less real leisure time than conventional labour statistics suggest.

As in previous regimes, huge inequalities are built into the tertiary time regime. The main inequality is class-based. Obviously, the super-rich have the most control of time. Below them in the class spectrum is the salariat – those with secure employment and all the perks that go with it. Strangely, in contrast to what applied under industrial time, so-called white-collar employees work, on average, the longest hours.

But there are three mitigating factors here. Firstly, the salariat have extensive periods of “empty labour” – time in the workplace when they’re not doing any labour. Some even admit to having much more empty labour than actual labour. Secondly, the salariat has “bleisure” – arranged activities blending on-the-job recreation with nominal labour, as in bonding retreats for executives. It’s the corporatisation of phoney leisure. And to cap it all, the salariat do retraining or upgrading in their labour time, at no cost to themselves.

Such privileges are denied to the proletariat beneath them, whose numbers are shrinking. But the worst time deprivation is found among the precariat – the mass class of the 21st century, consisting of millions of people experiencing multiple forms of insecurity, including unstable labour. Not only do they not have paid empty labour, bleisure or paid on-the-job training, but they also have to use a lot of time on searching for short-term jobs, on trying to upgrade or maintain skills, and on waiting around, at the ready, for tasks.

The precariat suffer most from the modern pandemic of presenteeism, that is, working even when they’re sick, for fear of losing pay, or losing their job, and because they don’t have sick pay or entitlement to sick leave. They’re also the most likely not to take even the holidays to which they’re entitled, for the same reasons.

And they must do a lot of work-for-the-state. If they want to claim state benefits, the government forces them to queue, fill in lengthy complex forms, report at Jobcentres at regular intervals, be on time or be sanctioned, without any respect for due process. They must spend 35 hours a week seeking jobs, and prove it to some junior bureaucrat. They must constantly update personal resumes that testify to their personal failure. And they must try to handle financial affairs, without necessarily having the expertise to do so efficiently or well.

Reflecting on all these incursions into people’s lives, it should be clear that we need a politics of time that would enable more people to have time to do the work that gives them most satisfaction and to participate in real leisure, rather than just snatch moments of relief. One guesses that most readers of the Idler are relatively privileged in terms of having time at their disposal. But to be idle should not be a privilege. We need a campaign to free the time of the precariat.

Guy Standing is the author of The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty (Pelican).

This is an edited extract of an article that appears in the November/December 2023 edition of the Idler – out now.

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