Taking Our Time: Remaking the Temporal Order
By Mike Donaldson
University of Western Australia Press, 1996. 206 pp., $26.95
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Any passing extraterrestrial from an advanced civilisation would be scratching their two heads with puzzlement if they examined some of the statistics Mike Donaldson presents in his new book on time and its discontents. Official unemployment in Australia is glued at 8-9% (over 20% if we add in hidden unemployment and underemployment), yet those in work are working longer hours (25%, indeed, working over 49 hours a week).
Surely all this extra work could be shared around to relieve unemployment, a solution so simple, yet so difficult in a temporal order controlled by the Time Lords who own not only the factories and offices and our labour but also our time. Donaldson (lecturer in Sociology at Wollongong University) argues that this crazy situation of too much work and not enough time for some people, and not enough work and too much time for others, is a structural defect of capitalism with its incessant quest for competitiveness through greater productivity.
Donaldson examines how "capitalism is seeking to make night into day and every day the same" in order to extract maximum productivity (more output for lower costs). Employers seek more shift work, more part-time and casual (disposable) workers, a wider spread of hours (starting earlier and ending later), more weekend work, all without labour overheads such as penalty rates. In many industries, Saturday and Sunday have become just another day at the salt mines.
As well as this "flexibilisation" which has eroded the standard eight-hour-a-day, five-day week (now worked by less than half of all workers in Australia) has come "intensification" through speed-up, closer supervision, failure to match staffing levels with workload and other techniques of the modern slave-driver.
The attempt to appropriate workers' time for the needs of production and profit, argues Donaldson, has been a major task of capitalism from the industrial revolution, when the new class of wage labourers had to be broken into the rhythms of industrial clock time. For the pre-proletariat with their seasonal rhythms of work interspersed with long spells of leisure, numerous feast days, unofficial holidays and celebrations, it had been party, party, party until Mr Top Hat and Big Cigar crashed the scene with requirements for rigid adherence to clock time and factory discipline.
The organised working class soon began resistance to the theft of their time. The struggles were long and often bitter, but they bore fruit. Sydney stonemasons won the eight hour day in 1855, the first in the world.
The struggle over ownership of time has been central to the history of industrial struggle, argues Donaldson, summing up the record as follows:
"Not all campaigns were successful, nor was the price paid for victory always bearable, or the gains won irrevocable. To the contrary ... torches were knocked to the ground, extinguished, rekindled; ground was gained, lost, regained."
The price paid has included loss of public holidays, meal breaks, penalty rates, the standard working week. Donaldson notes that enterprise bargaining has been a major tool used by employers for appropriating workers' non-work time. Union leaderships have pitched in, he also notes, trading off the gains from past time wars in the misconceived quest for greater productivity in the "national interest".
As well as the big set piece industrial battles, there has been "time banditry", low level guerilla resistance picking off isolated minutes from the boss, including unscheduled breaks, stretching a tea break, gossip via electronic mail and telephone, ducking off to have a haircut ("well, it grew during work time, didn't it?").
Winning time off at and from work to improve the quality of life outside paid work with family and friends, and slowing down the pace of work to counter stress, are still concerns that beat strongly in the chests of the working class. Resentment at the theft of our time is real ("What did your last slave die from?" is an expression that has escaped many a worker's lips in response to unreasonable work demands); it could and should be a focus for action by the union movement.
Writing from a historical materialist framework (No, Virginia, not all the Marxists in academia have drowned in the post-modernist swamp), Donaldson has produced an accessible, informative book of great relevance to the working class, particularly women workers with their double shift of paid work and domestic work. Donaldson also has a good discussion on Aboriginal conceptions of time and the confrontation with capitalist clock time.
If you have ever felt that time was shrinking, that you are finishing the day at work further behind than when you started, and wonder whatever happened to the standard eight-hour work day, then Donaldson's book has the answers to help us in the time wars.