Capitalist Time : Productivity, Labor and Leisure

The rise in technological management of workers' time, with a focus on productivity monitoring, is novel only in how widespread and unrelenting it has become. Across industries and income brackets, workers are increasingly being subjected to digital surveillance and tracking. The spike in remote forms of work during the pandemic changed how workplace supervision and evaluation could operate. Employers increasingly turned to technological techniques that could achieve a level of intrusion and monitoring that human managers were incapable of mimicking. But the phenomenon of worker surveillance is not a modern technological innovation. Apart from managerial forms of supervision, labor measurement has been quantified by the clock since the eighteenth century. The notion of clocked time as a proxy for work output is entwined with histories of labor, exploitation, colonization, and conquest.¹ Labor extraction remains a common basis for the relationship between time and capitalism, even as technology allows it to take different forms in the contemporary period.

Time is a notoriously difficult concept to sensorially grasp. Due to its surreal qualities, what counts as time, and how it is defined or measured are semiotically mediated concerns. Our linguistic scaffolding, which is to say, the language we use shapes how we think, interpret or judge our sense of time.² Time is then neither politically neutral nor timeless. Our relationship to time—the experience of accurate measurement and profitable use of time—is a historically constructed one, intertwined with the milieu of industrial capitalism as well as the racially-charged legacy of colonialism.

Our apprehension of time is technologically conditioned by the development of increasingly accurate timepieces that apart from regulating the rhythms of industrial life, acted as a means of labor exploitation.³ The core impulse of workplace supervision recalls plantation logic in the drive to seek control over the bodies that form the workforce.⁴ One cannot forget that business procedures and workplace techniques were developed by and for large plantations. The enforcement of work-discipline took on a temporal register in the industrial setting with clock time establishing punctuality and attendance as mechanisms to maximize the output extracted from workers.⁵

¹ Meryem-Bahia Arfaoui, Time and the Colonial State, The Funambulist no 36 (2021): np, https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/they-have-clocks-we-have-time/time-and-the-colonial-state

² John Keane, A New Politics of Time, The conversation, December 2, 2016, accessed October 27, 2022, https://theconversation.com/a-new-politics-of-time-69137.

³ EP Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present, no 48 (December 1967): 80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749.

⁴ Matthew Desmond, In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation, The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html.

⁵ Alvin Chong, In-depth: Time Consciousness and Discipline in the Industrial Revolution, SJX, July 21, 2020, accessed October 28, 2022, https://watchesbysjx.com/2020/07/time-consciousness-and-discipline-industrial-revolution.html.

⁶ Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, 90-91. Emphasis in original.

⁷ Larissa Crawford, Time is a Colonial Construct: Here's How I Learned To Reclaim Mine, Refinery29, July 8, 2021, accessed October 27, 2022, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/07/10567233/larissa-crawford-indigenous-decolonizing-time-work-balance

⁸ A detailed study of the class, race, gender and geopolitical dimensions of the protracted labor movements is outside the scope of this piece, but see: Marguerite Ward, A brief history of the 8-hour workday, which changed how Americans work, CNBC, accessed October 27, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-changed-how-americans-work.html

⁹ Melissa Gregg, The Productivity Obsession, The Atlantic, November 13, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/be-more-productive/415821/

The mechanical clock has transformed into modern technology that now facilitates unrelenting workplace supervision.

Worker idleness, labor inefficiency, and the wastefulness of time were frequent complaints of eighteenth-century mercantilists and moralists who were beginning to apprehend time as currency. As EP Thompson notes in his influential essay on time and work-discipline, in a mature capitalist society, all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to 'pass the time'.⁶ Mechanical clock time has fostered a strange and specific relation with people borne from a capitalistic understanding of what it means to be valuable or productive. The internalization of this doctrine of time-discipline has created a constant sense of urgency, and this constant frantic expectation for work.⁷

This history of the clock-governed culture of work is a story about power relations because those in power dictated the pace of the workday and how much workers' time is worth. In 1890, when the government began tracking workers' hours, full-time manufacturing employees worked 100 hours each week. Factory workers, exhausted from working too hard for long hours, called for an eight-hour workday without a decrease in pay. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which put a forty-hour limit on the work week, was the result of extensive labor movements spurred in part by the 1867 May Day strikes.⁸ The standardization of working hours into an eight-hour workday as part of a broader regulation of workplace standards was a hard-fought legislative victory that entailed tensions over productivity and leisure. Imposing limits on working hours required an acknowledgment that leisure was not simply a class privilege.

However, the idea of leisure as lost time or unproductive has been a persistent one, and it has shaped modern labor practices across different registers and domains of work. The ideological and moralistic framing that time as a concept is synonymous with profit has not lost efficacy. The worker's understanding and perception of time put to productive use, pivoting on this capitalist relationality are bolstered by workplace assumptions that rest and relaxation are optional affordances against what is expected of workers.⁹

Work in the modern economy is notable for its limitlessness.¹⁰ Employers have always sought to get the most out of employees, but the development of AI and algorithmically driven analytical tools to mine and study a dizzying amount of employee data,¹¹ has dramatically changed the scope and scale of this phenomenon. Corporations have deployed a variety of mechanisms that keep track of the minutiae of worker activity—monitoring keystrokes, cameras and, time spent on work-related software¹² in response to technological developments that have fostered the ability to work whenever from wherever as long as you got your work done.¹³ In other words, the slackening of ties to the office chair that is supposed to free the worker, has instead resulted in a proliferation of work environments. Notions of workplace and work-time flexibility presented as liberatory mechanisms to allow greater employee control over when and where they work merely mask embedded surveillance infrastructures that enact highly intrusive supervision to support corporate suspicions of worker slack or idleness. The seeming neutrality of the medium of technology subordinates morality to novelty. The collection of vast amounts of information from workers seem to respond not to social or ethical logic, but to the logic of technical possibility; can be digitally extracted will be, regardless of whether it should be. Employers refuse to acknowledge that the demands of constant connectivity that are imposed on workers are harmful and that software [is] warping the foundations of time and trust in [employees'] work lives.¹⁴ Instead, ever-more pervasive mechanisms of control are packaged and sold as revolutionary responses to the needs of the modern-day worker.

The issue of workplace surveillance has manifested across sectors and income brackets. Technology is being used to measure “who is doing how much when” and it is being used to gauge how much people get paid.¹⁵ Technology has enabled data collection from workers in a manner that has revolutionized the workplace. This has brought to the forefront a far more quantitative approach to employment which favors the employers by taking away agency and control from workers. Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, in a New York Times investigative piece, illustrate the problem with the 'worker productivity scores' in knowledge jobs where productivity measurement based on clocked time and digital activity fail to account for offline tasks or hard-to-quantify work.¹⁶

¹⁰ Oliver Burkeman, Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives, The Guardian, December 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives.

¹¹ Gaurav Lahiri and Jeff Schwartz, People Data: How Far is Too Far? Deloitte, March 28, 2018, accessed November 10, 2022, https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2018/people-data-analytics-risks-opportunities.html

¹² Kalyeena Makortoff, Barclays using 'Big Brother' tactics to spy on staff, says TUC, The Guardian, February 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/20/barlays-using-dytopian-big-brother-tactics-to-spy-on-staff-says-tuc

¹³ Jenny Odell, how to do nothing, Medium, June 29, 2017, accessed November 1, 2022, https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb

¹⁴ Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score, The New York Times, August 14, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/worker-productivity-tracking.html

¹⁵ Michael Barbaro, The Rise of Workplace Surveillance, August 24, 2022, in The Daily, Podcast, 34:45, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/podcasts/the-daily/workplace-surveillance-productivity-tracking.html?

¹⁶ Kantor and Sundaram, Worker Productivity Score.

¹⁷ Cory Doctorow, @doctorow, Twitter, 3:30PM, September 1, 2022, https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1300878795394617345.

¹⁸ Alex Rosenblat, Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019.

¹⁹ Adrian Hon, You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. New York: Basic Books, 2022, 55-87.
Gamification strategies are not hemmed in by employment law, leaving workers vulnerable to corporate extractivism. Moreover, contract workers are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, leaving them with our worker protection or legal recourse. See: Noam Scheiber, How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers' Buttons, The New York Times, April 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/02/technology/uber-drivers-psychological-tricks.html

²⁰ Hon, You've Been Played, 61.

²¹ Hon, You've Been Played, 60.

²² Frederick Winslow Taylor, the godfather of scientific management devised standards for maximum output for workers as the basis for compensation. But he derived information about worker output from biased or erroneous measurement and dubious methods of extrapolation. In the present day, sophisticated technology and its ability to scrap vast amounts of worker data makes possible an unprecedented scale of labor extractions. Hon, You've Been Played, 66-72.

In other words, since data is meritocratic, knowledge jobs have become impossible to measure on old metrics of time and location; yet those rubrics continue to be imposed in an ill-fitting manner.

Gig economy work is another sector where technology-backed surveillance has worsened labor conditions for a disposable workforce whom [the employers] owe nothing to.¹⁷ Processes of incentivization and gamification act in concert to obfuscate how digitally-mediated work platforms discourage taking time off. Companies such as Uber and Amazon Flex utilize a kind of data and algorithmic manipulation that subjects workers' labor and compensation to the operation of a black-boxed system. They use video game techniques, graphics, and non-cash rewards to induce competitive game-play and prod workers into working longer and harder. Alex Rosenblat has explored the kind of data extraction at play that uses badges, tokens, and rating metrics to exercise control over the amount of labor performed. The neutral face and language of technology work in tandem to camouflage the fundamentally anti-rest nature of this form of employment.¹⁸

Gamification delivers punishments in the language of reward and empowerment. The technological veneer obfuscates how the system exploits the independent contractors or temporary workers that make up the workforce.¹⁹ The merit-based system works by convincing workers that their poor performances—and correspondingly poor pay—is their own fault and not their employer's.²⁰ The key insight here is not simply the shifting of the blame and burden onto workers, but the way technology enables companies to extract maximum productivity at minimum cost,²¹ all while obfuscating overall compensation and how it is measured. Scholars have called this Digital Taylorism²²—the tyrannical imposition of harsh work-output expectations and standards on labor that do not account for exhaustion or the need for rest.

Workplace techniques of labor extraction as well as internalized notions of time-discipline have worked in tandem to set productivity as the default measurement of accomplishment. The drive for personal productivity as a burden inherited from colonial-capitalist notions of time and labor extraction manifest in external as well as self-monitoring and regulation techniques of the workplace. For some, this makes workplace surveillance and productivity monitoring something virtuous; it helps creates a feeling of getting a lot done as well as the the satisfaction of knowing you worked really hard and it was measured. As Melissa Gregg, the author of Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy, informs us, the quest for increased personal productivity—for making the best possible use of your limited time—seeks the pleasure of time management, which is ultimately the pleasure of control.²³ Having ingested the rhetoric, surveillance becomes a morality device tracking industriousness. It helps workers prove how good they really were.²⁴

In modern work culture, the worker and the workplace act in concert to undertake the colonization of the self by internalizing capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.²⁵ This is premised on the idea that we should consider life an economic venture: a race with winners and losers. This model of labor capitulates to a dissolution of boundaries where there are no longer 8 hours of work [perhaps there never were] but rather 24 potentially monetizable hours.²⁶ In the late nineteenth century, labor unions fighting for the standardization of the workday argued to establish 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will. Technological connectivity has, troublingly, harmed this demarcation of time by creating an expectation of constant connection that does not leave room for any kind of silence or interiority.²⁷ As work-from-home mechanisms installed by the pandemic have demonstrated, the blurring of temporal and spatial boundaries has done damage to the semiotic borders we draw between our work and non-work selves.

8-8-8 — graphic and song by Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, 1886

As part of this externally imposed and internally projected efficiency-based attitude, we have started feeling pressured to use our leisure time productively too. Rest and recreation seem valuable insofar as they serve some other end, such as recuperating to do more work.²⁸ Once our notion of time has collapsed into 24 monetizable hours, Jenny Odell argues, Time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on 'nothing'.

²³ Gregg, The Productivity Obsession.

²⁴ Barbaro, The Rise of Workplace Surveillance.

²⁵ Odell, how to do nothing.

²⁶ Odell, how to do nothing.

²⁷ Odell, how to do nothing.

²⁸ Burkeman, Time Management

²⁹ Odell, how to do nothing.

³⁰ Scott Rosenberg, The Unbearable Irony of Meditation Apps, WIRED, August 30, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/the-unbearable-irony-of-meditation-apps/

³¹ Annie Lowrey, The App That Monetized Doing Nothing, The Atlantic, June 4, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/do-meditation-apps-work/619046/

³² Lowrey, The App that Monetized Doing Nothing.

³³ Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn and London: Melville House Publishing, 2019): 49, 52.

It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive.²⁹ Technology has made it possible for all forms of attention to be subjugated to capitalism. One's self—in both work and non-work capacities—has been made into a source of data that powers capitalist extraction. There is a way to see this as an extension of the attention economy, one where every bit of our lives is subject to commercial exploitation to the fullest extent.

Technology professes to be the novel and modern solution to the historical problem of time-based labor attached to capitalist extraction. In reality, technology has exacerbated the problem by making possible greater amounts and degrees of intrusion into the lives of workers. Data and labor extraction are intractably twined, such that even virtual solutions to productivity problems and apps meant for self-help are ironically reliant on extracting data and attention from users.

The mainstream culture around self-care is capitalistically driven and is centered on spending money. A range of mindfulness and meditation apps, such as Calm and Headspace, purport to turn the digital into something good for one's health. Their business model is, however, one of upselling which requires the user to purchase their peace of mind via subscriptions. They are captures of time that we submit to numerical evaluation and competitive comparison with ourselves or others; gamification tactics turn serenity in a game of statistics.³⁰ Self-care practices have narrowed down into tools for thinking more clearly and working harder and squeezing more out of every tick of the clock.³¹ Digital wellness tools monetize the interest in self-betterment by channeling it to the end of improving labor. Wellness apps are fundamentally paradoxical: they are smartphone app[s] that purport to undo the anxieties of the smartphone age.³² Self-care has been less about protection against the ravages of modern wage-drudgery and more about capitalizing off the sentiment of digital anomie.

Then and Now — image from How to do Nothing, Odell 2019

To reclaim time, to resist the urge to sacrifice one's self for productivity, and to insist on rest as necessary are revolutionary ideas that require a fundamental reorientation in our relation to work, leisure, and productivity. Technology has bolstered a system of work that is fundamentally anti-rest. The socio-political transformation of structures of work and our apprehension of time-discipline and productivity cannot then rely on a technological/technical quick-fix. It is an age-old impulse, as Hannah Arendt tells us, to substitute design for the political process. A plurality of agents entails haphazardness and unpredictability of the sort that technical design promises an escape from. However, any attempt at substitution would be an attempt to reduce people to machines or mechanical beings.³³

Politics necessarily exists between individuals with free will and hence, any sort of deep restructuring cannot be solely technocratic.

Reduced working hours are not a solution in a culture of work that rewards pushing oneself to the point of exhaustion and burnout. Critiques of American work culture have idealized European models of four-day work weeks. As Oliver Burkeman notes, critics gaze longingly across the Atlantic, at semi-mythical versions of Scandinavia and southern Europe.³⁴ However, the future of work cannot simply look like adaptations and variations of the current system. Decolonization of time requires an acknowledgment that the 'grind culture of productivity,' which associates personal fulfillment and value with working is harmful.³⁵ We must return to the multifarious notion of time, looking beyond the Western standard temporal referential of linear time to seek out Non-Western social temporalities where time is overlapping, is in juxtaposition with other life-rhythms, is circular, and so on. The decolonization of our relation to time opens the arena to imagine alternative idealistic/utopian futures where work isn't so embedded in our lives. Whether technology can be helpful in this sort of semiotic and ideological reimagining is an open-ended question.

³⁴ Burkeman, Time Management

³⁵ Ayana Young, Tricia Hersey on Rest as Resistance /185, June 8, 2020, in For the Wild, Podcast, 1:11:15, https://forthewild.world/listen/tricia-hersey-on-rest-as-resistance-185

Reeva Dani

Capitalist Time

Productivity, Labor and Leisure