Saving Time

In comparison to those other forms of “screwing the nine to five”—worker organizing, legislation, and mutual aid—the allure of the productivity gospel is supposed to be that you don’t need anyone but yourself to achieve freedom.

The lived experience of a person working with an anonymous, algorithmic, and inscrutable interface is one demonstration of the way automation doesn’t so much replace work as reconfigure its content, conditions, and geography.

Now, not only does increased productivity not lead to free time, but it doesn’t lead to money for American workers.

“metric time first gave us the rule of the seas and oceans, then the colonization of the land; it taught us how to structure our bodies and movements in work and how to rest when the job is done.”

The more fragmented and minutely timeable work becomes, the more meaningless it becomes.

In contrast, for those timed by the time-study man, work becomes more like the Tramp’s work on the assembly line in Modern Times: consistent and eminently timeable, with less and less left to the discretion of the worker, who in turn becomes more easily replaceable.

Meanwhile, the relatively few persons for whom special knowledge and training are reserved are freed so far as possible from the obligations of simple labor. In this way a structure is given to all labor processes that at its extremes polarizes those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing.”

In this way, Taylorism rendered labor more abstract and fungible, hastening a process that has often been referred to as “de-skilling.”

As much as it was about intensification, Taylorism was also about breaking apart and codifying this process in a way that concentrated knowledge in the hands of employers rather than employees.