antoine-roquentin:

Historically, human work patterns have
taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. Farming,
for instance, is generally an all-hands-on-deck mobilization around
planting and harvest, with the off-seasons occupied by minor projects.
Large projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast tend to
take the same form. This is typical of how human beings have always
worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result
in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the
opposite effect.

One reason that work was historically irregular is because it was
largely unsupervised. This is true of medieval feudalism and of most
labor arrangements until relatively recent times, even if the
relationship between worker and boss was strikingly unequal. If those at
the bottom produced what was required of them, those at the top
couldn’t be bothered to know how the time was spent.

Most societies throughout history would never have imagined that a
person’s time could belong to his employer. But today it is considered
perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent out a
third or more of their day. “I’m not paying you to lounge around,”
reprimands the modern boss, with the outrage of a man who feels he’s
being robbed. How did we get here?

By the fourteenth century, the common understanding of what time was
had changed; it became a grid against which work was measured, rather
than the work itself being the measure. Clock towers funded by local
merchant guilds were erected throughout Europe. These same merchants
placed human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves
that they should make quick use of their time. The proliferation of
domestic clocks and pocket watches that coincided with the advent of the
Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century allowed for a
similar attitude toward time to spread among the middle class. Time came
to be widely seen as a finite property to be budgeted and spent, much
like money. And these new time-telling devices allowed a worker’s time
to be chopped up into uniform units that could be bought and sold.
Factories started to require workers to punch the time clock upon
entering and leaving.

The change was moral as well as technological. One began to speak of
spending time rather than just passing it, and also of wasting time,
killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so
forth. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an
episodic style of working was increasingly treated as a social problem.
Methodist preachers exhorted “the husbandry of time”; time management
became the essence of morality. The poor were blamed for spending their
time recklessly, for being as irresponsible with their time as they were
with their money.

Workers protesting oppressive conditions, meanwhile, adopted the same
notions of time. Many of the first factories didn’t allow workers to
bring in their own timepieces, because the owner played fast and loose
with the factory clock. Labor activists negotiated higher hourly rates,
demanded fixed-hour contracts, overtime, time and a half, twelve- and
then eight-hour work shifts. The act of demanding “free time,” though
understandable, reinforced the notion that a worker’s time really did belong to the person who had bought it.

[Essay] | Punching the Clock, by David Graeber | Harper’s Magazine