This article was written by Guy Standing, Professorial Research Associate of SOAS University of London and a co-founder and co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network, a non-governmental organisation that promotes a basic income for all. It draws on his new book, ‘The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty’.

  • The problem: There is a chronic inequality in access to quality time and an absence of a politics of time. Our official statistics conceal the extent of work and the pursuit of GDP growth jeopardises forms of time use that are more valuable than jobs.
  • Why it matters: The majority of people are denied free quality time by the demands put on them, many of which are injurious to health and to societal wellbeing.
  • The solution: Government, corporations and others should seek ways of minimising demands on people’s time and ways to enable them to spend more time on the work they wish to do and on societally beneficial leisure.

One of the most unfair forms of inequality is the inequality of time. Not only do higher-income people have longer life expectancy and a higher share of years of healthy life, but a privileged minority have a large amount of time in which they can choose to do what they wish to do, while many people have very little ‘free time’.

After health, time is our most precious asset. Yet we do not have a politics of time. There have been policies to cut labour – hours per week, entitlement to vacation and so on – but there has never been a strategy to increase free time or to reduce the inequality of free time.

Distorted national statistics

Politically, one could envisage a Good Society as one in which more and more people are able to use their time in ways that they wish. To make progress, one should reconceptualise what we mean by work and leisure and revise official statistics that give a distorted picture of how people use their time. So, for example, a prominent journalist commented that between 1950 and 2019, annual average hours worked fell by 500, so workers had gained that much in leisure. What he had done was take time recorded in jobs and, after accounting for sleep, treated the residual as leisure.

We need to revive commoning too, that is, freeing time for more of us to spend in shared productive and reproductive activities, including social care, ecological work, community gardening.

This reflects an impoverished view of both work and leisure. No conceptualisation of time uses is ideal. But our era is particularly stupid. If you take your dog for a walk, that is called “leisure”. If you pay someone to take your dog for a walk, that is called “work”, and generates jobs and GDP growth. One could give numerous other examples. If I care for my elderly mother, it is called “not working”. If I pay you to look after her, it is called “working”, and boosts jobs and GDP. If I dig potatoes on a farm for a wage, it is called “working”; if I grow vegetables in my allotment, I am “economically inactive” and not working.

To add to the confusion, the productivity of caring for one’s own child or elderly mother is most likely to be higher than if one pays somebody. And evidence shows that growing one’s own vegetables results in better health, less waste and better diet.

💬 Let the author know what you think about “work” and “leisure” by leaving a comment below

The salariat and precariat

The fault line does not stop there. In effect, our statistics ignore not only all work that is not labour but also measure some labour as work that is not really work. To illustrate this paradox, consider two modern groupings in the class spectrum, the salariat and precariat. The former typically experience three phenomena. First, they have empty labour, that is, many spells in which they are paid for labour, but do no work. A celebrated case was a civil servant who on retirement sent an email telling colleagues he had not done any work for 14 years. In another, a full-time employee of a British insurance company confessed he had done “one month of work for every year of employment”.

Second, over the years much labour time is in what has been dubbed bleisure, or what one might call a corporatisation of phoney leisure, evidenced in fancy bonding retreats and ‘away days’. Third, to cap it all they do retraining or upgrading in their labour time, at no cost to themselves, often labelled as CPT (Continuous Professional Training).

By contrast with the salariat, today’s mass class the precariat (those doing unstable insecure labour, without non-wage benefits and without a secure occupational identity) must do a lot of work activity that is neither recognised nor remunerated. Besides having no empty labour, bleisure and paid on-the-job training (which is a concealed form of inequality), they have huge demands on their time, which one can call work-for-labour and work-for-the-state.

Many examples are given in my book. But consider just a few. Many people must wait around at most times of the day and night, ‘on call’. To call that leisure would be ridiculous. Many must do endless retraining courses in the hope of maintaining or acquiring skills that might be in demand, usually at their own cost. Although called lifelong learning, for many, it probably feels like constantly taking dubious anti-ageing pills.

The precariat also suffers from the pandemic of presenteeism, staying in workplaces even when sick, for fear of losing pay or the job, and because they do not have sick pay or entitlement to sick leave. They are also unlikely to take even the few holidays to which they are entitled.

And they must do a lot of work-for-the-state. If claiming benefits, the government forces them to fill in lengthy complex forms, report regularly at Job Centres, 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 résumés that testify to their failure. And they must handle financial affairs, without the expertise to do so efficiently.

Free time should not be a privilege

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

For too long, the time of the poor has been given no value and been taken for granted. This must change. A politics of time should also combat two frightening trends – the panopticon state and the_ banopticon state_. The first arises from intrusive monitoring of the uses of time by mostly low-income workers, through algorithms and sundry electronic devices. It is the ultimate closing of the pores of the labouring day. One firm has 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.

As for the banopticon, social policy is increasingly punitive, finding ways to sanction the precariat by setting traps, so they can be “banned” from mainstream society. For example, if a claimant is late for an interview with a ‘work coach’ in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Job Centre, they can lose benefits, a punishment meted out without 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 happens to thousands of people. Politicians ignore the injustice. The same applies to the prolonged wait before those with disabilities can obtain desperately needed benefits, during which they must do work-for-the-state, unpaid. It is an immoral system.

A strategy around ‘time rights’

There is also a need for a strategy around time rights. Readers will have their own ideas. Let me just mention four. First, the government should encourage the process of job applications to become “brief encounters”. At present, many people must apply for hundreds of jobs before obtaining one offer. Many firms operate an algorithm system whereby applicants must go through many rounds of tests before any interview, if short-listed. There is no cost to the firm. But the applicants’ time is taken for granted, along with the stress. 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 overhauled, and the Department for Work and Pensions should become a genuine advisory employment and work service, rather than part of the justice system meting out penalties. Fourth, there should be a regulation that if a benefit is not delivered within a stipulated time, the claimant should be compensated.

We need to revive commoning too, that is, freeing time for more of us to spend in shared productive and reproductive activities, including social care, ecological work, community gardening, volunteering and participation in deliberative democracy.

This is a politics of time that goes way beyond regulations on labour hours. It is about time outside labour as much as inside it. It would convey an emancipatory vision that seems sorely lacking in the heart of British politics.

Done reading? Make sure to share your own thoughts on a politics of time by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)