Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The
first generation of factory workers were taught by their masters the
importance of time; the second generation formed their short-time work
committees in the ten-hour movement; the third generation struck for
overtime or time-and-a-half. They had accepted the categories of their
employers and learned to
fi
fight back within them. They had learned their
lesson, that time is money, only too well.
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Time discipline in the workplace was enforced with a variety of measures,
including time-sheets, time-keepers, whistles, bells, clocks, foremen, inform-
ers, and
ce of
“Saint Monday,” the day often used as a weekly holiday by workers in small-
scale industries and mining (Thompson 1967; Thrift 1981). Until the hegem-
ony of the factory, for example, in many weeks “Sunday was holy, Monday
was holy, and Tuesday was often needed to recover from so much holiness”
(Landes 1983:241). This transformation indicates that the imposition of a
new time consciousness was not a simple matter of progress, but one of
domination and resistance. Only by the end of the nineteenth century was the
contentious issue of work time resolved into a “normal workday,” although
struggles for two-day weekends continued into the 1930s. With a public and
transparent means of ordering time readily available, many workers began to
demand overtime. Industrial time was therefore not simply given, but pro-
duced and struggled over, and formed an important part of the working-class
struggles that erupted in periodic waves of disruption, most notably in the
revolutions of 1848.
Urbanization, factories, and the disciplinary power of the industrial work-
place conspired to inculcate in many social groups an ever-deeper sensitivity
to and appreciation of clock time and its role in regulating the rhythms of
everyday life. Clock time re
fi
fines. The transformation entailed losses, such as the sacri
fi
ected the politics of an earlier era: Dohrn-Van
Rossum (1996:318) notes that “the factory of the nineteenth century adopted
practical and symbolic elements of the time organization of the late medieval
city, with the di
fl
ff
erence, however, that clocktime, in the minds of those
a
ected, had become largely alienated time dominated by the powerful.” In
1863, Karl Marx wrote to Engels that “The clock is the
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first automatic
machine applied to practical purposes; the whole theory of production
of regular motion was developed through it” (quoted in Gleick 1999:35).
For Max Weber, the Protestant process of rationalization included the
ethical impulse to budget time, save time, and treat time as money. Thompson
(1967) maintained that the commodi
fi
ected the marriage of
the Puritan work ethic with industrial capitalism: with the hegemony of
industrialization, orientation towards tasks was displaced by an orientation
toward clock time. Thrift (1981), however, cautions against exaggerating
the dominance of industrial time, noting its ascendancy was contingent and
contested, and manifested di
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cation of time re
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erent groups; he describes
the new, clock-based temporal sense as “islands of timekeeping in a sea of
timelessness” (p. 2).
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erentially among di
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