Having real leisure time shouldn’t be a privilege for the few but a right for all, and that’s something we can only achieve if we address the inequalities of our present work regime, writes Guy Standing

We need a new politics of time. 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.

For too long, the time of people in the lower rungs of society has been given no value and has been taken for granted. This must change. A progressive politics of time would combat two frightening trends – the spread of the panopticon state (the panopticon is Jeremy Bentham’s prison where all inmates are either being surveyed or suspect they might be), and the spread of the banopticon state (more on which later). The first arises from the use of sophisticated electronic devices and algorithms to monitor (mostly low-income) workers’ labour and use of time. One firm which produces such devices boasted that its technology is designed to produce “work-from-home obedience”. Another offers employers a method of “mood monitoring”. The panopticon state must be dismantled before we all become its victims.

The banopticon state refers to the numerous and increasingly punitive ways in which the precariat are being sanctioned – setting traps for them such that they can be “banned” from mainstream society. For example, if a claimant is late for an interview with a designated “work coach” in a Department for Work and Pensions Jobcentre, they can lose their benefits, a punishment meted out without any due process. If the work coach is late or cancels a meeting, it is the claimant who pays with lost time and money for the trip. This has been happening to hundreds of thousands of people. And politicians ignore the injustice. The same applies to the prolonged wait, often of several months, before the poor and disabled can obtain desperately needed benefits, during which time they must do work-for-the-state, unpaid. It’s an immoral, rotten system.

This leads to the need for a coherent strategy for what should be called time rights. Readers will have their own ideas. Let me just mention four policies for starters. First, the government ought to encourage the process of job applications to become “brief encounters”. At present, many people have to apply for hundreds or even thousands of jobs before obtaining one offer. Many firms operate an algorithm system whereby applicants must go through six rounds of tests in order to be short-listed for an actual interview. There is no cost to the firm. But the time of the applicants is taken for granted, along with the inevitable stress and frustration. So, the policy should be that in the first round, the applicant pays in terms of time. After that, a payment should be made as compensation, rising in amount for each round. Any bets against the number of rounds falling?

Second, there should be a right to disconnect from electronic contact outside contracted hours, as in France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Third, to reduce work-for-the-state and for other reasons, Universal Credit should be abolished, along with the widely hated Department for Work and Pensions, which should be replaced by a genuine advisory employment and work service.

Fourth, there should be a regulation that if a state benefit or service is not delivered within a stipulated time, the claimant should be compensated.

We need to revive commoning too – that is, freeing up time for more of us to spend in shared productive and caring activities, including time for social care, time for ecological work, time in community gardens, time in volunteering and above all, time for participation in deliberative democracy, arenas in which political perspectives can be shared on an equal basis.

This is a politics of time that goes way beyond regulations on labour hours, working conditions and campaigns for a four-day labour week. It’s about time outside labour as much as inside it. And, by the way, building a basic income will be a vital part of an emancipatory politics of time.

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

This article appears in Idler #93.

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