by Ziya Tong
Time, as we shall soon see, has come to benefit some people at the expense of others. And as timekeeping has become more precise, modern time has become less flexible. Having lost the connection to measures we can physically perceive, modern time is not a measure of bodies or events. It is imperceptible. And this is our blind spot: we have confused our human measurement of time with time itself. Time’s power over us is that it is intangible. After all, how can you control something you have no control over?
The average quartz watch oscillates based on the imperceptible vibrations of a crystal at 32,768 Hz. Atomic clocks that govern everything from GPS to our smartphones to our traffic lights measure the invisible vibrations of strontium atoms. The United States Naval Observatory’s atomic clocks are so accurate that they won’t lose a second over three hundred million years, but even this level of accuracy has nothing on the latest horological devices. Today, the world’s most precise atomic clock will lose only one second every ninety billion years. Time as a measurement itself is now utterly abstract. As Dean Buonomano writes in Your Brain Is a Time Machine, “In 1967 an international consortium defined a second as: ‘the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.’ The basic unit of time became permanently divorced from the observable dynamics of the planets and placed in the domain of the imperceptible behavior of a single element.”
If time was once subjective, today it is completely objective. It is not the sun that tells us the time of day. Instead, we march to the drumbeat of atomic time. All of humanity has been synchronized. Time is no longer a signal from the sun but from a constant pulse beamed at us from satellites in the sky.
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IN 2013, MIWA SADO, a thirty-one-year-old reporter for the broadcaster NHK in Japan, died suddenly, cell phone still in hand, from a condition known as karoshi, a Japanese term that means “overwork death.” The term exists because in Japan occupational mortality is a real condition. Sado had put in 159 hours of overtime *4 that month before collapsing due to congestive heart failure. According to Tokyo-based reporter Jake Adelstein, her sudden passing was one of thousands of deaths from suspected overwork that take place in Japan every year.
The government launched an investigation and in 2016 issued its first white paper on karoshi. The report found a full one-fifth of Japan’s workers were at risk of overwork death. According to the companies surveyed, 22.7 percent of their employees logged over eighty hours of overtime per month—the level at which overtime becomes a health risk—and a further 12 percent logged over one hundred hours of overtime.
The tyranny of time is not new, and certainly not unique to Japan. Time has been structuring our days for millennia. Even two thousand years ago, people complained. Writing in 224 BC, the Roman playwright Plautus famously cursed the sundial in one of his plays:
The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours. Confound him too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small pieces! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial—one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
The dial told me when ‘twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I ought to eat:
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can’t fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town’s so full of these confounded dials.
Yesterday’s sundials are today’s digital clocks. And while we are often reminded that our ancestral past was brutal, it is worth remembering that in sourcing food the average hunter-gatherer adult only worked three to five hours each day, or twenty hours a week. Materially, we may have been poor, but temporally we were rich. And if time really is money, we may not have been so badly off.
The sociologist Daniel Bell made the keen observation: that “industrialization did not arise with the introduction of factories, it “arose out of the measurement of work.” Said another way, it wasn’t the invention of the steam engine or the spinning jenny that changed the world so much as our attitudes towards time. In a sobering case of “be careful what you wish for,” it turns out that the idea of overtime came from European cloth makers in the 1300s. In the Middle Ages, labour time was, as it had always been, equivalent to the amount of work that could be done in the light of day, from sunrise to sunset. Still, it was rather leisurely. *5 In towns, church bells signalled the beginning and end of the work day; for agricultural labourers, there was no need for such a prompt, because a field could not be worked in the dark. Cloth makers, on the other hand, worked indoors in the mills, and because there were many festive days in a year (marked by the religious calendar), they were forbidden from weaving during those times. That meant that they couldn’t always get the job done. In a plea to complete their work, they began to demand longer hours and higher wages, something all too familiar to us today but unknown at the time. Working at night, though, was illegal; those caught working by candlelight were fined and banished from the trade for life.
It was only in 1315 that mill owners began to authorize night work. This was, as far as we know, one of the first instances of being paid by clock time. In the cloth towns of Artois and Flanders, as historian Peter Stabel notes, we began to see the emergence of the term clocke des ouvriers, or “bell of the workers.” And soon a new rhythm would be set by textile manufacturers.
Unlike the previous church clocks, the workers’ new adherence to clocks, or Werkglocken, was more strictly enforced. To prevent them from cheating and using their time idly, the new clocks signalled when weavers should go to work, when they should break for lunch, when they should finish eating and return to work, and when they should quit at the end of the day. The weavers didn’t like the new arrangement nearly as much as they thought they would. Fines were issued to weavers who arrived late to work after the morning bell, and efforts to resist the new bell-regulated time were penalized. In the most extreme instances, using the bell to call together an armed workers’ resistance or a revolt against the king, alderman, or bellsman was punishable by death. As historian Jacques Le Goff notes, this temporal transformation marked a threshold between the world of ancient, natural cycles and the world we know today: “In the cloth manufacturing cities, the town was burdened with a new time, the time of the cloth makers.”
In the Middle Ages, it was difficult to incentivize weavers to work themselves to death, because hoarding pay beyond what was necessary to live wasn’t particularly worthwhile. It wasn’t until the industrial era brought in a fledgling consumer society that additional pay offered the promise of greater luxuries and the possibility of upward mobility. But time has always been regarded as precious, and people would not give it up easily.*6 Workers had to be trained.
The late seventeenth century is the first time the word “punctual” enters our vocabularies in the way it’s used today. Before then, the word had a different connotation and implied that a person was a stickler for details. Being “on time,” however, was increasingly touted as a virtue. In a pamphlet called Friendly Advice to the Poor, the English Reverend J. Clayton complained of “idle, ragged children” who did not obey the time. He advocated for a new purpose in schools. In 1755, he wrote, “the Scholars here are obliged to rise betimes and to observe Hours with great Punctuality.” School bells were introduced to structure the day, because a factory model of repetitive order prepared the young for hard work and industry. As Alvin Toffler writes in Future Shock, “Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time. The inner life of the school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to industrial society. The most criticized features of education today—the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher—are
precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time.”
This was a culture making a transition to a machine-based manufacturing world. It was an epic shift. And shaming those who abused time was one way to implement it. By the eighteenth century, punctuality and exactitude were encouraged as hallmarks of good citizenry, while slothfulness and “time-thrift” at work were seen as traits of the poor and slovenly.
It was around this time that Benjamin Franklin famously declared that time is money. In a 1748 essay entitled “Advice to a Young Tradesman,” he wrote, “Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, it ought not to be reckoned the only expence; he hath really spent or thrown away five shillings besides.”
Industrial capitalists now “owned” working time, and just like that they owned the workers. Once you’ve sold your time, you can hardly spend it as you like. In the eyes of the managers, the unprofitable use of time was theft, so the habits of wasting time had to be bred out of the workforce. One way to do that was with penalties. In England’s County Durham, Sir Ambrose Crowley and his son wrote out ninety-four rules in The Law Book of the Crowley Ironworks, which explicitly dealt with time. Wasted time was unpaid time: “This service must be calculated after all deductions for being at taverns, alehouses, coffee houses, breakfast, dinner, playing, sleeping, smoaking, singing, reading of news history, quarelling, contention, disputes or anything foreign to my business, any way loytering.”
Factory time, however, was not to stay within the confines of the factory or the school. It was spreading. Having gone from being a vast dimension to a “value,” time was soon to become a “product” in itself.
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IN THE 1800s, time was haphazard. In 1875, American railways had to operate under seventy-five different local times across the country, with most towns still structuring their local time by high noon, when the sun was at the highest point in the sky. In Germany, as Ian Beacock writes, “travellers had to clarify whether departures were according to Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Ludwigshafen, or Frankfurt time.” To avoid all this confusion, as is well known by now, the synchronization of time and the creation of time zones was initiated in large part by the railways.
The problem wasn’t the clocks; by now they were good at keeping local time. But without standardization on the national or continental level, they were effectively useless when it came to coordination. And so two entrepreneurs quietly stepped into this temporal fray and effectively changed forever how we perceive time.
Samuel P. Langley was the first person to sell time. In 1867, as the director of the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, Langley convinced local businesses and industries to pay for his time signals. His “master clock” would transmit the time via telegraph so that clients’ “slave clocks” could synch up to match it. Companies like Western Union and the Pennsylvania Railroad were soon on board, with the latter paying $1,000 a year for the observatory’s time signals.
Leonard Waldo, an astronomer and director at Yale University’s Winchester Observatory, took it a step further. Believing scientists could do a better job, he promised to sell a more exact time than was offered by Langley (which was off by one to two seconds). What both men had in common was that they became proselytizers for this new time and began calling for the end of local time, which Langley declared a “fiction” and a relic of the past.
This new time, however, would require a re-education of the masses. Writing to the railroad commissioners, Waldo stated that “any service which will train these persons into habits of accuracy and punctuality, which will affect all employers and all employees with the same strict impartiality, so far as wages for time deployed is concerned, will be a great benefit to the State.”
In 1891, the Electric Signal Clock Company began selling a factory clock aptly named the Autocrat. The new system, the brochure proclaimed, “gives military precision, and teaches practicality, promptness and precision wherever adopted…providing management and supervisors a means to extend their disciplinary reach beyond their vision [emphasis mine].”
In 1893, bell and master/slave clock systems were soon installed in factories. At the Chicago World’s Fair, a new factory clock was unveiled: one master clock connected to two hundred slave clocks, which were programmed to ring bells so that workers would start and stop machines.
For management, time control became a new form of power. The watchmakers, eager to sell their wares, also got into the action, promoting punctuality as a virtue and tardiness as undisciplined and undesirable. As Robert Levine writes, watchmakers started marketing the idea that it was important to “keep a watch on everybody” both literally and figuratively, an augury, we shall soon see, of what was to come. Punch clocks were also invented around this time to mark the exact moment each worker came to and left work. Within a few decades, all the time-stamping companies came under the consolidation of William Bundy, who created the International Time Recording Company, later known as International Business Machines, or IBM.
Today, this “technological conditioning” has reached a point where business time has so infiltrated our minds that we no longer need punch cards to know the importance of arriving on time at our jobs. Billions of people around the globe now wake up each morning to alarms, commute en masse to work, and arrive and depart at the scheduled times without thinking about why or how they came to be trained for the task. From the invention of punctuality and the new insistence never to be “behind the time,” factory time broke us away from nature’s cycle. It may have taken several generations, but as E.P. Thompson writes, “In all these ways—by the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; money incentives; partings and schoolings…new labour habits were formed, and a new time-discipline was imposed.” We now inherit this idea of institutionalized time and teach it to each new generation. Although it was completely (and recently) manufactured, it allowed machine time to flow into the present century.
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TODAY, MACHINE TIME is everywhere. Time is still money, but in places like India or Southeast Asia—where sweatshop labourers have supplanted European weavers—it’s not much money. If you can buy a nice shirt online for $13, then it isn’t only because of technology. It’s because in Bangladesh there is someone sewing it together for just US$.013 an hour.*7
That same shirt in the Middle Ages, historian Eve Fisher argues, would have cost thousands, if medieval workers were paid a modern American minimum wage. She calculated that given the time it took to spin the fabric (480 hours), weave it (20 hours), and then sew the material together by hand (8 hours), the average shirt required 508 hours of labour. In the United States, where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, producing that shirt by hand would cost $3,683. In Bangladesh, the shirt could be made for $65.
Of course, even with cheap labour, we don’t do all of our work manually. In fact, it was precisely because making cloth was so time-intensive that with the Industrial Revolution spinning machines were among the first inventions, and textiles were the first products to be mass-produced. The spinning and weaving of fabrics is now all done by machine, and at the end of the line is the factory worker, also working with a machine, who puts in the final hours of sewing. It is all this invisible labour, then, all of this invisible time, that transforms a shirt that once took 508 hours to put together and makes it available for a fraction of what the person who wears it might earn in a day.*8
Working faster, and shaving off more time equals more profit: a practice that has consistently gained momentum since Frederick Taylor introduced “scientific management” in the early twentieth century; the idea of breaking down tasks into individual motions. By the 1960s management experts optimized efficiency even more by breaking office and factory work right down to th
e minute. A manual published by the Systems and Procedures Association of America offered this “universal standard data” to employers, giving them a sense of how long basic tasks took:
Open and close file drawer, no selection = .04 minutes; desk, open centre drawer = .026 minutes; close centre drawer = .027 minutes; close side drawer = .015 minutes; get up from chair = .033 minutes; sit down in chair = .033 minutes; turn in swivel chair = .009 minutes; move in chair to adjoining desk or file (4ft max.) = .050 minutes.
By the 1980s, as Andrew Goatly notes in his book Washing the Brain, this dehumanizing tempo had entered the sweatshops, where “25% to 30% of all clerical workers found themselves being supervised by computer in electronic sweatshops doing boring, repetitious, fast-paced work that requires constant alertness and attention to detail.”
Fast forward to today, where workers in factory and office settings are routinely surveilled and timed for productivity. At Pegatron, China’s second largest manufacturer for Apple, “The workday typically lasts 12 hours on the assembly line. There are 90 minutes of breaks for meals and restroom. No talking. No standing up. No drinking water at your station. No cell phones. If you finish your work early, you must sit down and read employee manuals….The day’s task is to assemble back covers for the iPad. The quota is 600 per day, or 1 per minute.”
And it’s not just China. At Amazon warehouses in the United Kingdom, an undercover investigation revealed that 74 percent of workers were afraid to use the toilet because it would affect their target numbers. Many chose instead to urinate in bottles. At Centrelink, a call centre in Australia, employees punch in an ID code each time they want to use the bathroom. Breaks are timed, and workers are reprimanded for anything over five minutes. Bathroom breaks may seem trivial, but they are a pretty clear signifier of the way we all lose dignity when our time is not our own. According to a three-year investigative report by the charity Oxfam, titled No Relief: Denial of Bathroom Breaks in the Poultry Industry, workers in many US processing plants live under such a “climate of fear” that they dare not even ask to take a break. Instead, “Workers urinate and defecate while standing on the line; they wear diapers to work; they restrict intake of liquids and fluids to dangerous degrees; they endure pain and discomfort…[that put them] in danger of serious health problems.”
