the principle of the state intervening to regulate working hours. (It was the moral and child welfare agenda which in the end overrode arguments of economic freedom in the first half of the nineteenth century and ensured legislation on working hours. The question must be whether those agendas are capable of exerting similar power two hundred years later.) There were successive parliamentary Acts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reduce working hours. The final gasp was the engineering workers’ campaign for a thirty-five-hour basic week in 1989-90, in the last big conflict in the UK over working hours. Employers were finally persuaded to come to settlements of a thirty-eight- or thirty-nine-hour week, just short of the unions’ goal; the unions’ £15 million strike fund still remains, to be used for any future ‘Drive for Thirty-Five’. But the battle had lost impetus long before the eighties, argues Arrowsmith, who points to the fifties, when the trade union commitment to shorter hours was reduced to no more than a paper promise. The real push of union power in the next two decades was to trade time for more pay, which led to the institutionalisation of overtime. That became the ‘Trojan horse’ which enabled managers to renegotiate working practices through the eighties and nineties, forcing unions to accept flexibility and productivity deals in return for reductions in overtime and pay increases.
The chapter of history in which the struggle over working hours shaped the trade union movement, and vice versa, is largely over. Apart from some notable exceptions such as the teaching unions in their battle over workloads, and the civil service union bid for better work-life balance policies, it is not trade unions which will fight for those worst affected by the long-hours culture, such as managers and professionals, most of whom do not belong to any union. The European Union’s Working Time Regulations, implemented in 1998, have been the only attempt to curb long hours in the last decade and a half, and according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) 60 per cent of those working over forty-eight hours before the Regulations were implemented are still doing so, while 21 per cent are working more hours than before, and only 2 per cent have seen their working week reduced below forty-eight hours.26
One of the Regulations’ biggest weaknesses is that it exempted workers with ‘genuine autonomy’, which covered anyone who could claim a degree of control over their hours, such as those in managerial or professional work – so the unpaid overtime put in by the likes of Pete does not come within their scope. The Regulations have been more successful in their impact on extending access to paid holidays at the lower end of the labour market than in reducing hours. But for all their inadequacies, they have contributed to employees’ sense of entitlement. The CIPD survey showed broad support for them amongst long-hours workers, even if they didn’t actually benefit from them personally. The really striking figure in the survey was the pathetic 2 per cent who had actually seen their hours fall since the implementation of the Regulations, which reveals the toothlessness of the government’s bid to cut the long-hours culture.
Managing Time
Time at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century is being restructured. How we collectively organise our use of time is changing, as is how we personally see time. We are in the process of abandoning the time disciplines which structured our working and private lives for much of the last two centuries. This kind of restructuring has happened before, in the late eighteenth century at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as the historian E.P. Thompson described in his famous essay ‘Time and Work Discipline’: ‘The transition to a mature industrial society entailed a severe restructuring of working habits – new discipline, new incentives and a new human nature upon which these incentives could bite effectively.’
The dissenting traditions of Puritanism and Methodism provided the concepts of time essential for the development of a disciplined industrial workforce. The restructuring required getting rid of ‘St Monday’ – the habit of taking Monday and sometimes Tuesday off to recover from the excesses of Sunday – and the regularisation of craftsmen’s patterns of short, intense periods of activity interspersed with idleness. Factories required everyone to turn up on time: punctuality was born. They also required a move from paying according to the task, to paying according to the time: instead of paying per pot or piecework, the employer paid per hour. Time became something to be bought and sold, and was intimately bound up with the work ethic in the writings of men such as Benjamin Franklin, who epitomised the spirit of eighteenth-century American self-improvement with his strictures on wasting neither money nor time. The proper use of time was divinely sanctioned, and would form part of that final arbiter of our behaviour, the Last Judgement: we would be held to account for our use of time. Thompson concludes: ‘In mature, capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use.’ In 1967, when Thompson wrote his wonderful essay, he presumed that this capitalist exploitation of time had reached its apogee, and speculated on the possibilities of a future leisure age:
Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent that converted people to new valuations of time…which saturated people’s minds with the equation that time is money. One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism, whether the bohemian or the beatnik, has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable time values…if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work ethos which enabled the industrialised world to break out of poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan valuation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax?…Will people begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists?…If we are to have an enlarged leisure in an automated future…what will be the capacity of experience of people who have this undirected time to live?…If we become less compulsive about time, people might have to relearn some of the arts of living lost in the Industrial Revolution…how to fill the interstices of their day with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations…?27
What Thompson didn’t bargain for was the insistent call of the mobile phone, filling the ‘interstices of the day’ which his generation never dreamt would be colonised by the demands of the job: the mobile follows us home, on the school run, even into the toilet. What we have to ask ourselves is, why did we flunk Thompson’s challenge? Did we ever have the choice? Instead of learning leisure, our compulsion to see time as a commodity to be spent purposively has intensified, despite the decline of any sense of religious accounting, and despite the easing for the majority of the ‘pressures of poverty’.
Thompson did not imagine that in the last decades of the twentieth century time would again be restructured as sharply and as violently as it was in the late eighteenth century. Would he have believed it possible that this would arouse so little resistance – indeed that such a large part of it would rest on voluntarism? No need of a nineteenth-century-style factory supervisor here to enforce timekeeping with disciplinary measures; the disciplines of this restructuring take place inside our heads.
What the Puritan dissenting traditions taught was how to spend time, instead of pass time. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are expected to learn how to manage time. It takes a tenth of a second for Google to find 9,170,000 items on time management. There are a lot of people out there offering to teach you or to sell you software which will help you manage time. Companies sign up their workforces to what amounts to a massive educational campaign to restructure their use of time. Since when did time become so unruly that it needed this much managing?
As soon as the word ‘management’ creeps into a sentence, there is reason for suspicion. We talk of managing what is often irreconcilable – it’s a rhetorical reflex which replaces the conflictual rhetoric of, say, the seventies – and the word usually indicates complex compromises and trade-offs. The responsibility for negotiating those is squarely placed on the individual, because time management is regarded as a personal skill. At the level of micro-management of time, employers cannot always order compliance, particularly from highly skilled workers; they can only hope for efficient time-use by training
