The modern morality of “You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around” is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it. Insofar as an employee is not working, she is stealing something for which the employer paid good money (or, anyway, has promised to pay good money for at the end of the week). By this moral logic, it’s not that idleness is dangerous. Idleness is theft.
This is important to underline because the idea that one person’s time can belong to someone else is actually quite peculiar. Most human societies that have ever existed would never have conceived of such a thing. As the great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter—slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter’s time. As Finley observes, any such notion would have to involve two conceptual leaps which even the most sophisticated Roman legal theorists found difficult: first, to think of the potter’s capacity to work, his “labor-power,” as a thing that was distinct from the potter himself, and second, to devise some way to pour that capacity out, as it were, into uniform temporal containers—hours, days, work shifts—that could then be purchased, using cash.17 To the average Athenian or Roman, such ideas would have likely seemed weird, exotic, even mystical. How could you buy time? Time is an abstraction!18 The closest he would have likely been able to come would be the idea of renting the potter as a slave for a certain limited time period—a day, for instance—during which time the potter would, like any slave, be obliged to do whatever his master ordered. But for this very reason, he would probably find it impossible to locate a potter willing to enter into such an arrangement. To be a slave, to be forced to surrender one’s free will and become the mere instrument of another, even temporarily, was considered the most degrading thing that could possibly befall a human being.19
As a result, the overwhelming majority of examples of wage labor that we do encounter in the ancient world are of people who are already slaves: a slave potter might indeed arrange with his master to work in a ceramics factory, sending half the wages to his master and keeping the rest for himself.20 Slaves might occasionally do free contract work as well—say, working as porters at the docks. Free men and women would not. And this remained true until fairly recently: wage labor, when it did occur in the Middle Ages, was typical of commercial port cities such as Venice, or Malacca, or Zanzibar, where it was carried out almost entirely by unfree labor.21
So how did we get to the situation we see today, where it’s considered perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent themselves out in this way, or for a boss to become indignant if employees are not working every moment of “his” time?
First of all, it had to involve a change in the common conception of what time actually was. Human beings have long been acquainted with the notion of absolute, or sidereal, time by observing the heavens, where celestial events happen with exact and predictable regularity. But the skies are typically treated as the domain of perfection. Priests or monks might organize their lives around celestial time, but life on earth was typically assumed to be messier. Below the heavens, there is no absolute yardstick to apply. To give an obvious example: if there are twelve hours from dawn to dusk, there’s little point saying a place is three hours’ walk away when you don’t know the season when someone is traveling, since winter hours will be half the length of summer ones. When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time. There is a classic statement on the subject by the anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard on the subject; he’s speaking of the Nuer, a pastoral people of East Africa:
[T]he Nuer have no expression equivalent to “time” in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Nuer are fortunate.22
Time is not a grid against which work can be measured, because the work is the measure itself.
The English historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote a magnificent 1967 essay on the origins of the modern time sense called “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,”23 pointed out that what happened were simultaneous moral and technological changes, each propelling the other. By the fourteenth century, most European towns had created clock towers—usually funded and encouraged by the local merchant guild. It was these same merchants who developed the habit of placing human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves that they should make good use of their time because each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death.24 The dissemination of domestic clocks and then pocket watches took much longer, coinciding largely with the advent of the industrial revolution beginning in the late 1700s, but once it did happen, it allowed for similar attitudes to diffuse among the middle classes more generally. Sidereal time, the absolute time of the heavens, had to come to earth and began to regulate even the most intimate daily affairs. But time was simultaneously a fixed grid, and a possession. Everyone was encouraged to see time as did the medieval merchant: as a finite property to be carefully budgeted and disposed of, much like money. What’s more, the new technologies also allowed any person’s fixed time on earth to be chopped up into uniform units that could be bought and sold for money.
Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. Puritan, Methodist, and evangelical preachers soon began instructing their flocks about the “husbandry of time,” proposing that the careful budgeting of time was the essence of morality. Factories began employing time clocks; workers came to be expected to punch the clock upon entering and leaving; charity schools designed to teach the poor discipline and punctuality gave way to public school systems where students of all social classes were made to get up and march from room to room each hour at the sound of a bell, an arrangement self-consciously designed to train children for future lives of paid factory labor.25
Modern work discipline and capitalist techniques of supervision have their own peculiar histories, too, as forms of total control first developed on merchant ships and slave plantations in the colonies were imposed on the working poor back home.26 But the new conception of time was what made it possible. What I want to underline here is that this was both a technological and a moral change. It is usually laid at the feet of Puritanism, and Puritanism certainly had something to do with it; but one could argue equally compellingly that the more dramatic forms of Calvinist asceticism were just overblown versions of a new time sense that was, in one way or another, reshaping the sensibilities of the middle classes across the Christian world. As a result, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting in England, the old episodic style of working came increasingly to be viewed as a social problem. The middle classes came to see the poor as poor largely because they lacked time discipline; they spent their time recklessly, just as they gambled away their money.
Meanwhile, workers rebelling against oppressive co
nditions began adopting the same language. Many early factories didn’t allow workers to bring their own timepieces, since the owner regularly played fast and loose with the factory clock. Before long, however, workers were arguing with employers about hourly rates, demanding fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, the twelve-hour day, and then the eight-hour day. But the very act of demanding “free time,” however understandable under the circumstances, had the effect of subtly reinforcing the idea that when a worker was “on the clock,” his time truly did belong to the person who had bought it—a concept that would have seemed perverse and outrageous to their great-grandparents, as, indeed, to most people who have ever lived.
concerning the clash between the morality of time and natural work rhythms, and the resentment it creates
It’s impossible to understand the spiritual violence of modern work without understanding this history, which leads regularly to a direct clash between the morality of the employer and the common sense of the employee. No matter how much workers may have been conditioned in time discipline by primary schooling, they will see the demand to work continually at a steady pace for eight hours a day regardless of what there is to do as defying all common sense—and the pretend make-work they are instructed to perform as absolutely infuriating.27
I well remember my very first job, as a dishwasher in a seaside Italian restaurant. I was one of three teenage boys hired at the start of the summer season, and the first time there was a mad rush, we naturally made a game of it, determined to prove that we were the very best and most heroic dishwashers of all time, pulling together into a machine of lightning efficiency, producing a vast and sparkling pile of dishes in record time. We then kicked back, proud of what we’d accomplished, pausing perhaps to smoke a cigarette or scarf ourselves a scampi—until, of course, the boss showed up to ask us what the hell we were doing just lounging around.
“I don’t care if there are no more dishes coming in right now, you’re on my time! You can goof around on your own time. Get back to work!”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“Get some steel wool. You can scour the baseboards.”
“But we already scoured the baseboards.”
“Then get busy scouring the baseboards again!”
Of course, we learned our lesson: if you’re on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded, not even by a gruff nod of acknowledgment (which is all we were really expecting). Instead, you’ll be punished with meaningless busywork. And being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity—because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake. It didn’t matter that we were only pretending to scrub the baseboard. Every moment spent pretending to scour the baseboard felt like some schoolyard bully gloating at us over our shoulders—except, of course, this time, the bully had the full force of law and custom on his side.
So the next time a big rush came, we made sure to take our sweet time.
• • •
It’s easy to see why employees might characterize such make-work tasks as bullshit, and many of the testimonies I received enlarged on the resentment this produced. Here is an example of what might be called “traditional make-work,” from Mitch, a former ranch hand in Wyoming. Ranch work, he wrote, is hard but rewarding, and if you are lucky enough to work for an easygoing employer, it tends to alternate cheerfully between intense bursts of effort and just sort of hanging around. Mitch was not so lucky. His boss, “a very old and well-respected member of the community, of some regional standing in the Mormon church,” insisted as a matter of principle that whenever there was nothing to do, free hands had to spend their time “picking rocks.”
Mitch: He would drop us off in some random field, where we were told to pick up all the rocks and put them in a pile. The idea, we were told, was to clear the land so that tractor implements wouldn’t catch on them.
I called BS on that right off. Those fields had been plowed many times before I ever saw them, plus the frost heaves of the severe winters there would just raise more rocks to the surface over time. But it kept the paid hands “busy” and taught us proper work ethic (meaning obedience, a very high principle as taught in Mormonism), blah, blah.
Riiiight. A hundred-square-foot area of dirt would have hundreds of rocks the size of a fist or bigger.
I remember once spending several hours in a field, by myself, picking rocks, and I honestly tried to do my best at it (God knows why), though I could see how futile it was. It was backbreaking. When the old boss came back to pick me up to do something else, he looked disapprovingly at my pile and declared that I hadn’t really done very much work. As if being told to do menial labor for menial labor’s sake wasn’t degrading enough, it was made more so by my being told that my hours of hard work, performed entirely by hand with no wheelbarrow or any other tool whatsoever, simply wasn’t good enough. Gee, thanks. What’s more, no one ever came to haul off the rocks I had collected. From that day, they sat in that field exactly where I had piled them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still there to this day.
I hated that old man every day until the day he died.
Mitch’s story highlights the religious element: the idea that dutiful submission even to meaningless work under another’s authority is a form of moral self-discipline that makes you a better person. This, of course, is a modern variant of Puritanism. For now, though, I mainly want to emphasize how this element just adds an even more exasperating layer to the perverse morality whereby idleness is a theft of someone else’s time. Despite the humiliation, Mitch could not help but try to treat even the most pointless task as a challenge to be overcome, at the same time feeling a visceral rage at having no choice but to play a game of make-believe he had not invented, and which was arranged in such a way that he could never possibly win.
Almost as soul destroying as being forced to work for no purpose is being forced to do nothing at all. In a way it’s even worse, for the same reason that any prison inmate would prefer spending a year working on a chain gang breaking rocks to a year staring at the wall in solitary.
Occasionally the very rich hire their fellow human beings to pose as statues on their lawns during parties.28 Some “real” jobs seem very close to this: although one does not need to stand quite as still, one must also do it for much longer periods of time:
Clarence: I worked as a museum guard for a major global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused more or less permanently. My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touched the . . . well, nothing in the room, and ensure nobody set any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones, etc.
Since nobody was ever there, in practice I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I was to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it.
In a situation like that—I can attest to this because I have been in roughly analogous situations—it’s very hard not to stand there calculating “Just how much longer would it likely take me to notice a fire if I were sitting here reading a novel or playing solitaire? Two seconds? Three seconds? That is assuming I wouldn’t actually notice it quicker because my mind would not, as it is now, be so pulped and liquified by boredom that it had effectively ceased to operate. But even assuming that it was three seconds, just how many seconds of my life have been effectively taken from me to eliminate that hypothetical three-second gap? Let’s work it out (I have a lot of time on my hands anyway): 27,000 seconds a work shift; 135,000 seconds a week; 3,375,000 seconds a month.” Hardly surprising that those assigned such utterly empty labor rarely last a year unless someone upstairs takes pity and gives them something else to do.
Clarence lasted six months (roughly twenty million seconds) and then took a job at half the pay that afforded at lea
st a modicum of mental stimulation.
• • •
These are obviously extreme examples. But the morality of “You’re on my time” has become so naturalized that most of us have learned to see the world from the point of view of the restaurant owner—to the extent that even members of the public are encouraged to see themselves as bosses and to feel indignant if public servants (say, transit workers) seem to be working in a casual or dilatory fashion, let alone just lounging around. Wendy, who sent me a long history of her most pointless jobs, reflected that many of them seem to come about because employers can’t accept the idea that they’re really paying someone to be on call in case they’re needed: