Before Anybody Owned the Time

There are two ways of organising work, and the difference between them is not a detail. Task orientation means the job sets the pace: you milk the cows because they need milking, finish the row because it is nearly done, and stop when the light goes. There is no clock in it, and no sharp boundary between working and not working. Clock orientation means an hour sets the pace, and the hour belongs to somebody else.

E. P. Thompson's argument, in an essay from 1967, is that the factory did not simply offer people a different job. It required a different relationship to time, and people accustomed to the first did not take to the second naturally. The teaching took generations.

His evidence is mostly complaint, which is the clever part. Employers' diaries about workers who did not turn up. Fines for lateness, and the elaborate machinery of bells, gates and timekeepers. Sermons on idleness. School timetables designed as much to instil punctuality as to teach. And an enormous didactic literature on how to make the poor regular in their habits. The sheer volume of that literature is the argument, because nobody writes at length about a habit people already have.

Saint Monday is the best single illustration. Where work was paid by the piece and the worker controlled the pace, Monday was widely not worked. The week's money having arrived on Saturday, and the week's output being achievable in four or five days of harder effort. Employers complained about it for two centuries. It died with the factory whistle and the hourly wage, because it required the employer rather than the task to decide when work happened.

The standardisation of time itself came from a different direction and completed the process. Every town keeping its own solar noon is invisible until vehicles start moving between towns on a schedule, at which point it becomes a collision risk. British railways adopted a single time in the 1840s, well before it was legally general, and the rest of the world followed for the same reason. It is a good example of infrastructure forcing a change nobody wanted for its own sake and everybody now experiences as natural.

Thompson is not scoring the two systems against each other, and it is worth resisting the temptation to do it for him. Clock time is better for coordinating many people around machinery, which is exactly what a factory requires. Task time is better for work whose pace is set by the thing being worked on. His interest was in what the transition cost the people who had to make it, which an efficiency comparison skips over entirely.

The argument is running again now, in reverse, and most of the people having it do not know they are repeating it. A team argues about whether work should be measured in hours present or in output delivered. Hours make sense when output is proportional to attendance, which is true of a loom and false of a difficult problem. What is genuinely new is the alignment: it is workers arguing for task orientation and employers frequently defending the clock, which is exactly the opposite of 1830. The underlying question (who owns the day) has not changed at all.