Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira – The re-enginnering of time

The re-engineering of time does not simply involve the re-organisation of labour or family relations, argues Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira. The organisation of time is inherently related to the debate, in both the private and the public spheres, on the pursuit of happinness, the good life, and ethical responsibility.

When I was a little girl, to earn a living meant ensuring your survival through paid employment. Today, the expression “earn a living” has acquired a different meaning. I take it literally to mean finding again, recapturing the multiple dimensions of enjoying the world, resisting to the fearless intrusion of productivity that destroys private life and swallows moments of love and entertainment. Earn a living means above all recapturing your first material: time.

There was a time when we were earning our life in work. Today work earns our life. In order to improve this irrational imbalance I propose a reorganization of time.

The expression re-engineering emerged in English in the 1990s. In the explosion of globalization in order to combat international competitiveness, firms stopped using the older methods of production and management. They changed the processes, employed talents, and established daring and innovation as values of the highest order. A large part of their employees lost their jobs. The effect on society was tragic, but earnings increased.

Time and everyday life

The re-engineering of time is a call to the rehabilitation of firms, public administration, and society. The purpose is to avoid the fallacies and losses that, at a societal level, lead firms to bankruptcy. Keeping in mind, this time, the existential benefits for people and the establishment of a new relationship between people, the firm and public administration. The reorganization of time is a movement for the transformation of everyday life of men and women towards a better quality of life and the increase of the gross product of their happiness. It is a plan that results into practical measures: change of timetables in public administration, flexibility in employment time in businesses, multiple spaces of employment that allow for greater investment in the house, radical transformation of gender roles.

It does not consist only in practical measures for the harmonious co-existence of private and professional life. The re-organization of time is an exercise, whose ultimate purpose is the return of public debate on the meaning of life, reminding us of selfless actions, emotional ties and solidarity. The re-organization of time constitutes a presupposition for the effective production of ourselves and a renewed society. It is a new art of life.

Reconfiguring this structure will be inevitable when women succeed in putting in the everyday agenda of democratic public debate a simple idea: the organization of life and the balance of social times should be re-structured in order to face the new realities of family life. The co-existence of men and women in public space might appear as a regular feature. But the speed of this transformation does not alter its size and density. What was unthinkable for many centuries was achieved in a very short period of time.

The movement reclaiming power in everyday life is developing primarily amongst women because dissatisfaction with the arrangement of the everyday life touches mostly women. It extends to men also, however, because they are being overwhelmed with a dissatisfaction that they do not even manage to recognise.

Employers will have to face realities that they are trying to avoid. Public administration and firms will have to face the challenge of innovation in the organization of production and distribution of services in order to take into consideration the differentiated needs of the population.

Extraordinary technological development leads the way for the evaluation of productivity – that today depends much more on knowledge than on physical energy or hours spent working. Technology allows a reduction in necessary time spent in offices and public administration. The visual world allows for the displacement of the work place. We can work anytime, anyplace, any pace as IBM is proclaiming,

The 21 st century opens up through the multiple tools of new technologies that radically change the meaning of time and place. Big cities, hit by monstrous traffic jams, would benefit from the multiplicity of spaces, the flows of people that disperse in different timetables.

The re-organization of time results into personal, family and social transformations. It might constitute today a minority point of view but, as in the past, dissatisfaction –of women and men- is huge in the face of an everyday life becoming unbearable.

The usage of time is a good experiment in the ideology of “it was always this way”. But what if it wasn’t this way, as those who are not afraid the characterization utopian are claiming or those who give to the word utopia the meaning that Ernest Bloch gave: the point where from we begin to judge what we do under the light of what we should be doing

To work harder and better

For the first time in contemporary history, paid work might stop capturing the greatest part of our time and life. The liberation of work is already in the horizon in developed societies, where non economic values gain momentum.

André Gorz was one of the first thinkers to capture this revolution as early as the 1980s. He warned us that we underestimated the economy of work produced by the technological revolution and that economy reduced 2% of work load needed for the achievement of the same goal. Taking into account the accelerations foreseeable within the 21st century and the improvements in the field of robotics, according to Gorz, work requirements will be reduced to one third in a period of fifteen years. Thus he foresaw that in France the number of unemployed will increase by 35% in the beginning of the century.

The ideal solution for Gorz was to allow people to work less and better receiving in the form of earnings their share in the increasing wealth. This would be possible as long as a social policy was implemented, through which buying capacity would not depend on quantity of work offered, but on the quantity of produced wealth.

Gorz was aware that such a transformation in people’s lives accustomed to work as the primary source of identity and social insertion, was not to be an easy path. The adoption of non economic values and non orchestrated activities, however, constitutes a necessary step in order to give life a different meaning, beyond income and paid work.

That which does not have a price

The choices we make during our life-time depend on what we consider valuable. We exchange one thing for another; we struggle more for one thing than for another, depending on the value we attribute to each one. Values have an inherent existence; they are “worth” for what they are.

In economy, things are different. We do not ask what the value of a thing is, but how much it is priced. The existence of value is relevant and capable of being transformed in exchange – which is in general money. When value, in the economic sense of the word, oversteps the filed of values, which emerge from within ourselves, and their meaning does not depend on their exchange value, this means that change in society is in progress. A change to the worse.

One of the wounds of market society is that it contaminates with its logic, with its fury, all that surrounds it, transforming in numbers, counting, calculating what exists, in order to decide when something has a value or not. It is a type of contamination that affects language and introduces in our vocabulary concepts like those of “human capital”, “human resources’, insinuating thus that every man should be subject to monetary evaluation.

It is in our hands to prove that we can escape from market society that poisons social relations and re-built a meaning destined for life itself, the enjoyment of moments not produced in order to be bought or sold.

Further links

For a fair sharing of time – Brazil households

Institut Chronopost (in French)

Special issue: recent articles, time/governance
Tags: gorz, labour, rosiska darcy