Against the economic view of time

Abstract

In the philosophy of work, free time, negatively defined as time not spent in paid and unpaid employment, has received little attention. Attempts to justify free time often employ egalitarian arguments on the grounds of social justice and equality. Firms and corporations, however, are seemingly under no primary obligation to distribute and allocate free time as a more demanding moral entitlement. The hidden difficulty lies in the modern economic view of time: (1) individual time is reducible to a private property available for market transactions; (2) the value of time is measured in terms of productivity. We may say, then, that employers claim to own labour time in employment. This presents a fundamental challenge to the claim to fair shares of free time. The first half of this chapter develops a primitive account of temporal injustice as a result of the commodification of time in the capitalist workplace and economy. The second half argues that such injustices constrain the moral claim to free time in a deeper sense. The struggle for free time is seen as a collective project of emancipation.