Title: Life Time: Care Under the Clock

Speaker: Rebecca Hall, Associate Professor, Global Development Studies, Queen’s University

Date: Friday, September 25, 2026

Host: Queen’s Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace

Description: In Canada and around the globe, policymakers and advocates have declared a care crisis. Our intimate caring duties, tending to family, home, and community, exist in perpetual collision with our working hours. In her forthcoming book, Life Time: Care Under the Clock, Professor Rebecca Hall asks what changes when we think about the care crisis as a crisis of time experienced as a scarcity of care. In this podcast, she discusses the tensions between the valuation of work time under capitalism and the care time we both give and need.

Podcast:

Transcript:

00:00:00 Speaker 1
It's my great pleasure to introduce the first speaker in our series for this academic year, and that is Dr.
00:00:08 Speaker 1
Rebecca Hall.
00:00:09 Speaker 1
She's an Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in Global Development Studies here at Queen's and her research centers feminist political economy and social justice, examining how land and resources are accessed and organized and how people work, care and reproduce upon those lands.
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She maps the ways in which global capital draws upon gendered, racialized and colonial structures in processes of dispossession and exploitation and is interested in highlighting local spaces of feminist, anti-racist and decolonizing resistance to the pressures of global capital.
00:00:47 Speaker 1
And I'll apologize, I should have begun before introducing Dr.
00:00:50 Speaker 1
Hall with a land acknowledgement.
00:00:53 Speaker 1
So I do want to acknowledge that we are situated here on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg people.
00:01:01 Speaker 1
And for me,
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Engaging in a land acknowledgement is really a reminder of my own place and position within the historical and ongoing legacy of colonialism in Canada and an invitation, much in the way that Dr.
00:01:16 Speaker 1
Hall's work invites us to think about how we exist on the lands that we find ourselves.
00:01:25 Speaker 1
So today, Dr.
00:01:26 Speaker 1
Hall will share with us her work from her forthcoming book, Care Under the Clock.
00:01:33 Speaker 1
And in this book, she asks what happens when we talk less about how hard it is to care and more about how hard it is to care under capitalism.
00:01:43 Speaker 1
What changes if we think about the care crisis as a temporal crisis, a scarcity of time experienced as a scarcity of care?
00:01:53 Speaker 1
And so with that, I'll ask you to please join me in welcoming Dr.
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Hall.
00:02:02 Speaker 1
Hey, thank you so much, Professor Hastie.
00:02:04 Speaker 2
And thanks, everyone, for being here.
00:02:05 Speaker 1
It's really nice to see a crowd on a Friday afternoon.
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And thanks to those online.
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I hope everyone can hear me OK?
00:02:13 Speaker 1
Yeah, OK.
00:02:14 Speaker 2
So I'd like to begin just by thanking.
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Professor Hastie for inviting me and to Professor Hastie and to Lemma for coordinating the event.
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I first met Bethany last year and we quickly learned we had a number of shared research interests.
00:02:29 Speaker 2
Including interests related to care work.
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So I told her about this book that I was writing and she invited me to come give this talk.
00:02:37 Speaker 2
And I said yes, but with a warning that the book would certainly not be done by the time I was giving the talk.
00:02:42 Speaker 2
So she has kindly framed this as a work in progress.
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session.
00:02:48 Speaker 1
So as Bethany said, the book that I'll be speaking about is called Lifetimes, Care Under the Clock.
00:02:53 Speaker 2
And it's going to be coming out with McClellan and Stewart around this time next year.
00:02:59 Speaker 2
It's what's called a crossover book.
00:03:01 Speaker 2
So that means that it's coming out for a popular audience, but it's rooted in academic literatures and contemporary debates.
00:03:10 Speaker 1
So for today, I'll be reading excerpts from the draft manuscript and sharing some of the underlying arguments and concepts that have shaped my writing so far.
00:03:19 Speaker 1
So a little bit about me, as Bethany said, I'm associate professor in Global Development Studies.
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I live in the Skeleton Park neighborhood with my partner and our two kids and our two cats.
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And I mention that just.
00:03:30 Speaker 1
Because the book is certainly shaped by my academic interests in labor and care, but it's also shaped.
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By everything in my life that is outside of academia.
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And you'll be hearing about that more in just a second.
00:03:43 Speaker 2
So let's see if I can get these slides moving.
00:03:46 Speaker 2
All right.
00:03:47 Speaker 2
You'll see that my slides are pretty minimal, so minimalistic.
00:03:52 Speaker 2
So if you are listening on Zoom, feel free to change your settings so that you don't see the slides, especially when I get into excerpts from the book, just because there's not going to be a lot going on the slide deck.
00:04:04 Speaker 2
So my disciplinary training is as a feminist political economist.
00:04:08 Speaker 2
So in the book today, I'll be thinking about these concepts, so the concepts of care and time through the lens of labor.
00:04:15 Speaker 2
So when I talk about care, I'm really talking about care work, the work of caring for each other, the interactions between our paid work and our unpaid work, and how the work that we do is shaped by who we are, where we are, and in the case of this book in particular, when we are.
00:04:30 Speaker 2
So the time we're living in and how the present interacts both by what has come before us and the futures that we seek to make.
00:04:38 Speaker 2
So these are the three analytics I'm working with, and I'll be delving into all of them shortly, but I did want to start just with a brief definition of care because obviously it is so central to the talk.
00:04:48 Speaker 2
So what do I mean by care work?
00:04:50 Speaker 2
So when I'm talking about care work, I'm talking about all the work that we do in the different spheres of our life that is oriented towards the maintenance and the reproduction of life.
00:05:00 Speaker 2
So for any feminist political economists in the room, that's going to sound a lot like social reproduction.
00:05:04 Speaker 2
And that is really what I'm talking about.
00:05:06 Speaker 2
I'm coming from the literatures of social reproduction.
00:05:09 Speaker 2
I'll be using care mostly just to make it more legible across disciplines.
00:05:14 Speaker 2
So this work can be paid.
00:05:16 Speaker 2
So think, for example, of personal support workers, early childhood educators.
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It can be unpaid.
00:05:22 Speaker 2
Think of all the work that you did this morning, for example, to get yourself prepared to come to the workplace, the work that you do to care for loved ones.
00:05:30 Speaker 2
And also care often sits on that muddy line between paid and unpaid work.
00:05:35 Speaker 2
So here there's lots of people in academia in the room.
00:05:37 Speaker 2
Think of the work that you do to care for your coworkers, for your students, for your classmates.
00:05:43 Speaker 2
Certainly our paid work would not persist, it would not exist if there was not care infused into it.
00:05:49 Speaker 2
But often this work is obscured and it tends to fall unequally along the lines of gender, race, work status, and social location.
00:05:59 Speaker 2
So care is a big topic and it is one with which we all have a lot of experience.
00:06:04 Speaker 2
So I will do my best to leave lots of room for conversation because I'd love to hear your thoughts, both as people who might write and read about care, but also as people who live care.
00:06:14 Speaker 2
So I'd love to hear about how you experience care and likely how you feel constraints in your caring capacities.
00:06:22 Speaker 2
As has likely become obvious, I'm not a legal scholar, but I'm delighted to be hosted by the law school.
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And I will, in the talk, try to flag some ways in which the issues I'm discussing, largely as a political economist, have been taken up by legal scholars.
00:06:36 Speaker 2
But I don't do a whole lot of that, so I really invite these insights in our conversation period.
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In other words, I'd really like to learn from you.
00:06:45 Speaker 2
So to begin, I'm going to read a short excerpt from the introduction of the book.
00:06:49 Speaker 2
After that, I'll get into some of the book's key concepts and I'll end with a second excerpt, which is from one of the case study chapters.
00:06:57 Speaker 2
So in the first excerpt that I'm reading, I explain why time became a central analytic in a book that is about care.
00:07:06 Speaker 1
All right, so here's.
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One of those spots where I have a slide, but we don't need to pay any attention to that.
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It's really just a place filler.
00:07:12 Speaker 2
Okay, so here's the excerpt.
00:07:15 Speaker 2
So this book was supposed to be about care and its discontents.
00:07:19 Speaker 2
But as I said to its writing, it didn't take long to realize I was writing a book about time.
00:07:24 Speaker 2
I write from within a care crisis, expansive and intimate.
00:07:28 Speaker 2
In Canada, emergency room visits are so unwieldy, people choose to tough it out at home.
00:07:34 Speaker 2
And having access to a family doctor feels like a luxury.
00:07:37 Speaker 2
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the devastating care gaps for the elderly in our country, but the so-called return to normal has not brought with it any remedy.
00:07:47 Speaker 2
The small daycare my children once attended, just down the street, Queens Daycare, now has a wait list of over 800 families.
00:07:55 Speaker 2
While today their school teachers find themselves split so many different ways, with little time to spread between the children and their care.
00:08:02 Speaker 2
Our own intimate caring duties, so that's tending to kin, home, community, land, are at once contained and overflowing, in perpetual collision with our paid working hours.
00:08:14 Speaker 2
We call this a care crisis and crisis it is.
00:08:17 Speaker 2
Crisis is the right word when life-making and life-saving services are no longer available, when parents have to wait so long for a daycare spot that their child ages out of the system, when cancer goes undiagnosed because a person has no primary care, and when adult children must sacrifice their wages and jobs simply to be with their elderly kin when they're most needed.
00:08:39 Speaker 2
But the more I thought about the care crisis, the more I rebelled against its framing.
00:08:44 Speaker 2
I thought about my daily school drop-offs, the softness of my daughter's little fingers as I pulled on their mittens.
00:08:50 Speaker 2
These moments are stressful, but not because of their content.
00:08:54 Speaker 2
They're stressful because of their constraints.
00:08:56 Speaker 2
I feel pinched when I'm checking in with teachers over the schoolyard fence because my mind is parsing through neglected emails in my inbox.
00:09:04 Speaker 2
I feel harried as I hug my children, Hattie and Fern, goodbye because I feel guilty.
00:09:09 Speaker 2
Guilty for moving too quickly with my children and moving too slowly to get to work.
00:09:14 Speaker 2
I live, so many of us live, in perpetual temporal overlap, working and caring and commuting all at the same time, but still it is not enough.
00:09:23 Speaker 2
My time is not enough, but more than that, the time we collectively give to the work of care, the life-making that builds and sustains us, is not enough.
00:09:34 Speaker 2
What happens then when we reframe the caring crisis as a temporal crisis, a scarcity of time experienced as a scarcity of care?
00:09:42 Speaker 2
How might this change the way we understand our own time and the care we do and the alternate better timelines that we might imagine?
00:09:50 Speaker 2
Because while we glorify it, ignore it, normalize it as though humans have been responding to the dreaded ping of their inbox since time immemorial, time poverty is a major social problem.
00:10:03 Speaker 2
It's a social problem that has, contra the dreams of techno-utopians, gotten worse, not better, in the digital age.
00:10:10 Speaker 2
So about 100 years ago, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the new millennium, people in the global north would only need to work three hours a day to meet our needs.
00:10:20 Speaker 2
Sounds nice.
00:10:22 Speaker 2
The century following Keynes's prediction was filled with visions of leisurely futures, from the playful domestic robots of the Jetsons to more sobering images of humans served and coddled to the point of obsolescence.
00:10:34 Speaker 2
And for those who are fans of Pixar, I'm thinking of Wall-E here.
00:10:38 Speaker 2
But while we might finally live among robots who can curate our playlists and grocery lists alike, paid and unpaid working hours haven't dropped markedly in a century, and people are reporting feeling busier than ever.
00:10:52 Speaker 2
So in 2018, 80% of working Americans reported that they never had enough time.
00:10:59 Speaker 2
For those who balance work time with primary care responsibilities, the time crunch is at its most acute.
00:11:05 Speaker 2
So much that in 2024, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory about the mental health impacts of parenting.
00:11:13 Speaker 2
When the US Surgeon General issued an advisory about smoking, people tried to quit smoking.
00:11:18 Speaker 2
So let's assume we're not looking for the same outcome here.
00:11:22 Speaker 2
Certainly, people do not have children for all kinds of reasons, including choosing not to have children out of a concern for personal or ecological health.
00:11:30 Speaker 2
But on a societal level, we're not looking to quit child rearing.
00:11:34 Speaker 2
Instead, we can read this warning as a need to rethink the conditions under which we all care for our children, our parents, our friends, our partners.
00:11:42 Speaker 2
What is it about the way we as a society organize our time that leaves so little for the things that matters most?
00:11:50 Speaker 2
Time, or at least human time, is a way of measuring and structuring life.
00:11:54 Speaker 2
The way we tend to time shapes the ways in which we tend to life and the lives that surround us.
00:12:01 Speaker 2
Across histories and geographies, people have vastly different understandings of time.
00:12:05 Speaker 2
But today, here, we live according to clock time, a mode of measuring that has been carried with so many colonial ships.
00:12:12 Speaker 2
Our clocks are more than just a measurement tool.
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Clock time is sculptor and disciplinarian, shaping our daily tempos to the hammered rhythms of the market economy.
00:12:22 Speaker 2
Because time, the minutes and days and years that make up our lifespan, sits at the heart of economic growth.
00:12:28 Speaker 2
So at the heart of capitalism is our labor time.
00:12:32 Speaker 2
We're paid for units of time dispensed, and our productivity is measured by what is achieved in that time.
00:12:38 Speaker 2
And so our time must be efficient and accelerating, measurable and measured, endlessly quantified.
00:12:45 Speaker 2
Care evades those imperatives.
00:12:48 Speaker 2
Care is unwieldy and circular.
00:12:50 Speaker 2
Often at its best, it is slow.
00:12:53 Speaker 2
So the feeling that our lives with our intimate messiness just don't fit
00:12:57 Speaker 2
that our love, our commitments, our unruly bodies, and our patient but pain planet is spilling out of the calendar boxes allocated to us, this is no accident.
00:13:07 Speaker 2
It's not a cultural quirk or an individual failing.
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Instead, we are feeling our care time, our lifetime, hitting up against the compulsions of capitalist time.
00:13:17 Speaker 2
This is the crisis, not all that we tend to, but the demands on our time that make these administrations so difficult.
00:13:26 Speaker 2
So care time is at odds with the clock, but this ill fit is not a deficiency with care itself.
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This ill fit is also not a result of the deficiency or inefficiency in ourselves.
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This book does not offer time management solutions for our busy lives.
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Instead of time management, I encourage us to manage time, to reinvent the rhythms that govern us.
00:13:48 Speaker 2
Okay, so that's the end of the first excerpt and it sets the stage a little bit.
00:13:54 Speaker 2
So through the book, I trace the tensions between care time and work time and really thinking about work time as work time under capitalism through our lifespan.
00:14:03 Speaker 2
And the writing's a little bit small here, but this just gives you the table of contents of the book.
00:14:07 Speaker 2
So in part one, care under the clock, I develop the central tension between care and capitalism.
00:14:14 Speaker 2
In part 2, lifespan, I examine the ways in which this tension plays out through our lifetimes, from the first day of our lives to the last.
00:14:21 Speaker 2
And in part 3, Care Beyond the Clock, I asked how we might center care in our social and economic lives.
00:14:28 Speaker 2
So this third part of the book is driven by what I call a thin normative convergence that we have around care.
00:14:34 Speaker 2
That is that we all tend to agree that care matters.
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What we don't agree on is what care should look like, who should do it, and how it should be valued.
00:14:42 Speaker 2
So some big questions remain.
00:14:44 Speaker 2
And we all spend an awful lot of time caring.
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So in the third part of the book, I look at strategies for moving the hands of the clock so that they're more oriented towards care.
00:14:55 Speaker 2
So that's the book as a whole.
00:14:56 Speaker 2
What I'd like to do now is get into the analytic of time, so different ways we can conceive of time.
00:15:01 Speaker 2
And in the book, I talk about time in three different ways.
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You can see them up on the slide here.
00:15:06 Speaker 2
So the first is time as a social problem.
00:15:08 Speaker 2
So looking at time scarcity, time poverty, temporal inequities, these are all ways we talk about this.
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The second is time is value.
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And here this is getting into how time is valued under capitalism.
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So looking at the labor theory of value.
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And the third is thinking about time quite simply as our life, right?
00:15:25 Speaker 2
Time is life, time is care.
00:15:27 Speaker 2
Just going to check how we're doing for time.
00:15:28 Speaker 2
Oh, we're doing good for time.
00:15:30 Speaker 2
How long would you like me to speak for?
00:15:33 Speaker 2
I should have asked this earlier.
00:15:36 Speaker 2
About 45 minutes is okay.
00:15:38 Speaker 2
Okay, that's good.
00:15:39 Speaker 2
All right, then we are on track.
00:15:42 Speaker 2
OK, so first, thinking about time as a social problem.
00:15:46 Speaker 2
So this way of thinking about time goes back to that US Surgeon General warning that I mentioned in the first excerpt about the time crunch of parenting.
00:15:55 Speaker 2
But more broadly, time scarcity is a very readily observable phenomenon.
00:16:00 Speaker 2
So for most of us, if you ask your coworkers how they're doing or your neighbors how they're doing, what's the first thing everybody always says?
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Busy, right?
00:16:09 Speaker 1
Everybody's busy.
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Everybody's busy all the time.
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So that's sort of the first impulse for thinking about time as a social problem.
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We all tell each other it is a social problem all the time.
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And the second thing is we can also observe that this busyness causes harm.
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So for individuals, when busyness equates with stress, this can lead to physiological harm, mental harm, societally, where time scarcity can lead to, for example, gaps in social provisioning.
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There's some really interesting feminist legal scholarship.
00:16:40 Speaker 2
So for example, Beth Goldblatt is a feminist scholar coming out of Sydney in Australia.
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She does some work asking how we can translate the depletion that people feel in their unpaid work.
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So looking at mostly work in the home.
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She asks, how can we translate that depletion into harms that would be legible in our legal system?
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Judy Wiseman is another academic who's been working on this question.
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She is a sociologist and a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics.
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And she's done a lot of work unpacking the notion of time as a social problem.
00:17:14 Speaker 2
So she asks, what does it mean when everybody around us says they're busy?
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Quantitatively, how are we actually spending the hours in our day?
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And qualitatively, what do these time allocations feel like?
00:17:26 Speaker 2
So she's a great book called Pressed for Time.
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When you're writing about time, there's so many fun plays on words that you can do and she has one of them.
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So in Pressed for Time, Dr.
00:17:34 Speaker 2
Wiseman writes that while there is a collective impression that we're spending more time at our jobs than ever, the numbers tell us something else.
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In the United States and Canada, and this is similar in a lot of other highly industrialized countries, the average working week for adults has rested at about 40 hours a week for the last 50 years.
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But Wiseman's quick to note that this stasis in the average time conceals major social changes in the way we actually spend our time.
00:18:01 Speaker 2
And here she's really talking about how we spend our time in our sort of the years that are conceived as our working years, right?
00:18:07 Speaker 2
So this would be like over 18 and pre-retirement if you are lucky enough to retire.
00:18:13 Speaker 2
So in the past 50 years, work time has become increasingly polarized.
00:18:18 Speaker 2
And here she is mostly talking about North America, but again, there's a lot of similarities in UK and Europe.
00:18:24 Speaker 2
So low income jobs have become more and more precarious, often set up as temporary contracts with part-time hours.
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So this means that those who need long hours the most to make a living because their wages are low, are the least likely to be getting them.
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On the other end of the spectrum, it's high wage workers whose hours have increased the most in the last 50 years.
00:18:45 Speaker 2
So for besuited office workers, liquid lunches and afternoons spent golfing have been replaced by takeout dinners eaten at the desk and weekends tethered to work phones.
00:18:54 Speaker 2
And I'm sure for the lawyers in the room, you can tell us a lot about the discussions around work-life balance that have been happening in your profession.
00:19:01 Speaker 2
And in all of our professions, I'm sure.
00:19:04 Speaker 2
So it's really long hours rather than leisure that have become a new status marker.
00:19:09 Speaker 2
The class division between those who don't have enough work and those who have too much work can also help to explain why we hear so much about busyness.
00:19:17 Speaker 2
What I mean by that is that overworked CEOs have much more of a soapbox than overworked nannies.
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But the nannies are busy too, often taking care of people both for pay and not.
00:19:27 Speaker 2
And this is the other major shift in the last 50 years, and here's where we explicitly get into care.
00:19:33 Speaker 2
So paid working hours have increased markedly for people who are also primary caregivers.
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And that is mostly, but certainly by no means exclusively mothers.
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So while working hours have risen dramatically for people who are primary caregivers, we simply haven't seen a commensurate drop in their caregiving hours.
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So in fact, the tenacity of our own unpaid caring hours is so pronounced that it's been given a name.
00:19:58 Speaker 2
So here I'm at the third bullet point on the slide, and I'm talking about something called the Cohen paradox.
00:20:04 Speaker 2
So there's two separate but intersecting phenomena that speak to the tenacity of our care time that I'd like to note here.
00:20:12 Speaker 2
So the first is the Cohen paradox.
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Ruth Schwartz Cohen is an American historian.
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In the 1970s and 80s, she was interested in the everyday impact
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of the proliferation of household technologies.
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So in the 20th century, we saw people getting fridges in their homes for the first time, laundry machines, canned food, and she wanted to know how is that changing our domestic labor time.
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And the shocking finding that she had was that it really didn't, it didn't change.
00:20:39 Speaker 2
So she looked at domestic labor time in the United States from 1880 to 1970, and her finding was that through this century, domestic labor time for women stayed the same.
00:20:52 Speaker 2
If we sort of move onward, so she was finding this in the 80s.
00:20:55 Speaker 2
If we take these findings to 2026, one interesting thing to note socially is that the household technologies have not continued to proliferate in the way that she thought they would.
00:21:05 Speaker 2
And I'd love to talk about technology and domestic labor later.
00:21:09 Speaker 2
We can maybe save that for the Q&A.
00:21:11 Speaker 2
But we also have continued to see this stasis, right, in domestic labor time.
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We've seen little change in the time that women spend doing care work at home.
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And we've seen an increase in the amount of time that men spend doing care work at home.
00:21:26 Speaker 2
So this speaks to the second phenomenon that I wanted to mention, which is that while we've seen this dramatic rise of women in the paid workforce in highly industrialized countries, there's not been this restructuring of what work looks like at home.
00:21:40 Speaker 2
Now to be clear, this rise that we've seen from the 1970s onward in women working outside the home
00:21:46 Speaker 2
is really a middle to upper class phenomenon, largely in white households.
00:21:51 Speaker 2
And that's because working class women, migrant women, black women and women of color were already working outside of the home in large numbers.
00:21:59 Speaker 2
And they were already dealing with the double burden that we started to hear about a lot more in the 1990s and the 2000s.
00:22:06 Speaker 2
And in fact, many scholars, and I'm thinking here of Patricia Hill Collins,
00:22:10 Speaker 2
Note the additional labors of, for example, caring for community, especially in the context of racism and socioeconomic marginalization.
00:22:18 Speaker 2
And so they don't talk about the double burden.
00:22:20 Speaker 2
They talk about the triple burden.
00:22:23 Speaker 2
So much like we see in the Cohen paradox, while our working lives have changed, our care time persists.
00:22:30 Speaker 2
Now, it's very hard to measure care time.
00:22:32 Speaker 2
And this is
00:22:33 Speaker 2
For the methodologists in the room, this is something I'd love to talk about as well in the Q&A.
00:22:37 Speaker 2
But most measures in highly industrialized countries find that while men's childcare has grown considerably in the last 50 years, women's has not gone down.
00:22:48 Speaker 2
It stayed the same.
00:22:49 Speaker 2
And a lot of scholars interested in domestic labor talk about this intensification of child rearing and ask questions about why we've seen such a growth in the amount of time people spend doing childcare, even as they're working eight hours
00:23:03 Speaker 2
day outside the home.
00:23:05 Speaker 2
So the tension between our work time and our care time that shapes the time crisis in which we live is a shared storm, but of course we navigate it through very, very different ships.
00:23:15 Speaker 2
So the time poverty that I feel as an academic and a mother of children is very different from the time squeeze my partner feels as a father and an employee of a city government.
00:23:25 Speaker 2
It's also different than, for example, a worker at Queen's Daycare who I got to know quite well, who looked after both my children, who commuted for an hour both ways to get to her job, and who had to contain the care work of her own children because of the demands of the care of my children and the other children at Queen's Daycare.
00:23:43 Speaker 2
So we may all use that same language of busyness, but we're using this language to describe unequal relationships to time that fall sharply along the lines of gender, race, class, and location.
00:23:56 Speaker 2
So within these unequal relationships, I'm sure it's clear that hours of work are a fairly blunt instrument to understand time scarcity.
00:24:04 Speaker 2
This doesn't include, for example, commuting time.
00:24:07 Speaker 2
doesn't include coordination time, the responsibilities that occupy our minds as we move through our days, doesn't include time density, which is something I'll talk about a little bit more later, but time density is this question of, sure, you spend, let's say 8 hours a day at work, but what actually happens in those hours, right?
00:24:24 Speaker 2
How full are they?
00:24:26 Speaker 2
But despite the blendness of it all, it is still worth saying that most adults spend an awful lot of the hours of their lives doing paid work.
00:24:34 Speaker 2
So we remember Keynes' prediction that we'd all be working 3 hours a day by now.
00:24:39 Speaker 2
So we haven't just fallen short of that prediction for leisurely human futures, but instead the tenacity of our working days has really denied the link between innovation on the one hand and free hand on the other, right?
00:24:53 Speaker 2
That link just does not exist.
00:24:55 Speaker 2
So why is this so?
00:24:57 Speaker 2
Why haven't the proliferation of technological innovations in the last century led to more free time and more time to care?
00:25:04 Speaker 2
Now, there are a lot of ways we can answer that question.
00:25:07 Speaker 2
I'm going to get into one way here, which is to turn to Karl Marx's 3 volume opus, Capital.
00:25:16 Speaker 2
So in Capital Volume 1, Marx argues that time, specifically human work time, is at the heart of creation of new value under capitalism.
00:25:25 Speaker 2
So what does he mean by that?
00:25:28 Speaker 2
I won't go too deeply into Marx's labour theory of value because I imagine there are some people in the room who have spent a lot of time reading Capital, and there are also likely some people in the room who have spent a lot of time avoiding Capital.
00:25:42 Speaker 2
So because of that, I'll try to just look at a few key themes, but what I have on the slide here are some of the elements of the labour theory of value that really inform the writing in the book.
00:25:53 Speaker 2
And specifically, I want to look at the labor theory of value as a way of thinking through the tension between care time and work time.
00:26:01 Speaker 2
So the first thing is that for Marx, labor time, and labor time, that means human labor time, the time we spend working in paid employment, and he is specifically talking about paid employment here, that is what shapes the value of commodities under capitalism.
00:26:16 Speaker 2
So the things we buy and sell.
00:26:18 Speaker 2
So this is the first big point he makes.
00:26:20 Speaker 2
And the second point he makes is also that it's our
00:26:23 Speaker 2
human labor time that creates new value under capitalism.
00:26:28 Speaker 2
So how does he get to these two big conclusions?
00:26:30 Speaker 2
So for conclusion #1, and this is going to be a really quick and dirty approach to capital, but we'll do our best.
00:26:36 Speaker 2
So how he gets to conclusion #1 is he observes that all the commodities that we have in the world from this hair elastic that I have to my iPhone,
00:26:48 Speaker 2
All of these are very, very different things qualitatively.
00:26:51 Speaker 2
How do you value a hair elastic against an iPhone?
00:26:55 Speaker 2
He says you need to have some sort of common denominator.
00:26:58 Speaker 2
You need to have something that allows you to measure these two commodities against each other quantitatively.
00:27:04 Speaker 2
And so he
00:27:07 Speaker 2
He goes through a lot of ideas about how this might happen.
00:27:09 Speaker 2
And ultimately, what he comes to is that he says the thing that we are at a societal level broadly measuring is the amount of average human labor we imagine in these different commodities.
00:27:21 Speaker 2
So not the actual human labor that goes into making the hair elastic, but the average amount of human labor that would go into making the average elastic.
00:27:30 Speaker 2
And so this doesn't give us the exact price, the like, I don't know how much elastic costs, the $0.50 that this elastic costs,
00:27:36 Speaker 2
It doesn't give us that because he's not talking here about like market fluctuations or the brand of the elastic.
00:27:41 Speaker 2
He's talking about the fact that if someone said this was $1,000, I would balk, right?
00:27:47 Speaker 2
I would never buy an elastic for $1,000.
00:27:49 Speaker 2
But people do buy iPhones for $1,000.
00:27:51 Speaker 2
And that is because of this general human assumption about the amount of labor that is represented by the iPhone.
00:28:00 Speaker 2
So that's what he's talking about when he says that it is our labor time, like our human time that underpins value under capitalism.
00:28:08 Speaker 2
But then the question that he asks next is, okay, this is how we might value things, but how is new value created?
00:28:16 Speaker 2
At the level of the enterprise, how is it that a certain boss makes a profit?
00:28:20 Speaker 2
And then at the level of society, how is it that we see expansion in our economy?
00:28:26 Speaker 2
And there are many things that contribute to this expansion, but he argues the sort of the heart of it all is our unpaid labor time.
00:28:35 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:28:36 Speaker 2
What he means by unpaid labor time is he says in the broad sense, employers need to ensure that workers are inputting more value, so more time,
00:28:48 Speaker 2
into the product than they're being paid for.
00:28:50 Speaker 2
And this gets into the second bullet point here, which is surplus value.
00:28:54 Speaker 2
So that's what he calls surplus value, right?
00:28:56 Speaker 2
It's the labor that people are putting into commodities that they're not being paid for.
00:29:02 Speaker 2
And this might sound as though, it is like it's theft or it's like a bad thing, but this is of course what people are doing all the time, right?
00:29:10 Speaker 2
This is part of the everyday workings of capitalism.
00:29:12 Speaker 2
And Marx identifies two ways in which this happens in very everyday ways that, you know, we have all likely experienced as workers and certainly observe.
00:29:20 Speaker 2
So the first is absolute surplus value, which just means getting workers to work for as long as possible while paying as little as possible, right?
00:29:29 Speaker 2
So this would be things like extending
00:29:32 Speaker 2
work hours, curtailing lunch hours or breaks or paid holidays, giving your staff phones so they can take their work home.
00:29:39 Speaker 2
And certainly these contestations around work time, around collecting absolute surplus value have been key areas of labor struggle and of labor law.
00:29:49 Speaker 2
So you think of the Canada Labour Code, employment standards.
00:29:53 Speaker 2
I once worked on a research project where we were tracking employment standards violations in Ontario, and it was amazing how many of these violations really boiled down to employers' attempts to increase work time without paying for it.
00:30:07 Speaker 2
So that's what Marks called absolute surplus value.
00:30:10 Speaker 2
The second mode of increasing surplus value, increasing the use of workers' time, labor time, is less regulated because it's about that time density question.
00:30:21 Speaker 2
It's about intensifying working hours.
00:30:24 Speaker 2
So this can happen, for example, by introducing technologies that demand efficiency, like assembly lines or e-mail.
00:30:32 Speaker 2
And we can all recognize that these struggles happen over time in individual workplaces, but in aggregate, the consequence of the drive to squeeze out work time in all these different workplaces is to speed us up societally.
00:30:45 Speaker 2
So it's more than the sum of its parts.
00:30:48 Speaker 2
As work speeds up, our valuation of work time changes.
00:30:51 Speaker 2
So as we get what used to be done in four hours and one hour because of e-mail,
00:30:57 Speaker 2
soon we have to get it done in one hour, right?
00:31:00 Speaker 2
That's the sort of speed up of time over time.
00:31:03 Speaker 2
And whenever I think about that or read about that, I always think of Alice Through the Looking Glass, which is I think the book where there's the chessboard and she's running and she's running to stay on that one chess piece.
00:31:13 Speaker 2
So that's what we're talking about, right?
00:31:14 Speaker 2
The acceleration of time over time.
00:31:18 Speaker 2
Okay, that's it for Marx's Capital.
00:31:22 Speaker 2
The second way, so that was the second way to think about time, which is to think about it as a measurement tool, as a way of assigning value.
00:31:30 Speaker 2
It's a quantitative measure, but time, as we know, is much more than its measure.
00:31:35 Speaker 2
So if we think of time as quite literally our life, shaped by who we are and where we are, then we start to think about time as something with which we are in relation, something that we're in.
00:31:46 Speaker 2
So there's a few things that I want to say about
00:31:49 Speaker 2
The first is that I don't think it's particularly helpful to think about the qualitative approach to time as separate from the quantitative approach.
00:31:58 Speaker 2
As we all know, having less time makes us experience time differently, right?
00:32:03 Speaker 2
The quality of it shifts.
00:32:05 Speaker 2
And as I was writing about this, I thought about a talk that was here a few years ago with Jenny Nadelsky, who was visiting from U of T, hosted by Professor Burrows.
00:32:15 Speaker 2
And she was giving a wonderful talk about her book, Part Time for All.
00:32:19 Speaker 2
And in that session, we talked a lot about how care changes when you have more or less time for it.
00:32:25 Speaker 2
And then in that talk, I remember we ended up discussing the feeling of making dinner and the qualitative chasm between slowly making a dinner with a friend over many hours and throwing a pot on the stove when you're hungry after a long day of work and you have to go to a meeting soon.
00:32:42 Speaker 2
So in both cases, that labor of making dinner, it happens, but they're not the same activities at all.
00:32:48 Speaker 2
The experience of them is not at all the same.
00:32:51 Speaker 2
So turning to paid work, Emma Dowling, who's a scholar at the University of Vienna, wrote a book called The Care Crisis.
00:32:58 Speaker 2
And in it, she traces the qualitative impact of time scarcity on paid care.
00:33:03 Speaker 2
So she tracks the speed up of home care work in the UK, where once home care workers were paid the time it took to meaningfully care for their clients.
00:33:11 Speaker 2
So they had time, for example, to light a fire, make a meal, check in on emotional and physical needs.
00:33:18 Speaker 2
Now this work is ostensibly the same, but it's compressed into very measured scheduled allotments and pared down to the essentials.
00:33:26 Speaker 2
So for the home care worker and client alike, the quality of their time together is eroded.
00:33:31 Speaker 2
And it's a scarcity of time experienced as a scarcity of care.
00:33:37 Speaker 2
So care, we know intuitively, can't operate via the mechanisms for acceleration that shape our economy and our working lives.
00:33:44 Speaker 2
Sometimes care, and this is the second bullet point here, sometimes care simply is time.
00:33:49 Speaker 2
And to think about it that way, imagine, for example, being with a friend or a loved one who's ill.
00:33:53 Speaker 2
Sometimes you're just sitting with them and you don't feel like you're doing much at all.
00:33:57 Speaker 2
But in these cases, care is time.
00:34:00 Speaker 2
It's not something that can be compressed.
00:34:03 Speaker 2
When we talk about self-care too, often we're not talking about needing a massage or a spa day, though those are certainly very nice things.
00:34:11 Speaker 2
We're talking about the time that we need to ourselves, the time we need to rest.
00:34:18 Speaker 2
So let's focus in more on care work and think about how centering care can make us think differently about time.
00:34:26 Speaker 2
This is partly because care reveals the way in which our own lifetime is woven into those of so many others.
00:34:32 Speaker 2
As, for example, Professor Burroughs has written about the ways in which our lifetime is connected to humans and non-human animals, to plants, land, to past and future kin.
00:34:42 Speaker 2
It allows us to think about time as something we inhabit rather than a resource we can spend or waste or use wisely.
00:34:50 Speaker 2
So over the last five decades, and before that as well, feminist scholars have done a great deal of research in advocacy on care, revealing the tremendous amounts of unpaid labor that occurs to get us from one day to the next, and tracking the ways in which our care work is devalued in the workplace.
00:35:06 Speaker 2
When care is paid, we know it tends to be underpaid, deeply so, and it often occurs in unregulated, exploitative, and potentially harmful conditions.
00:35:16 Speaker 2
So there was a study that was conducted here in Ontario and it found that 88%, a full 88% of personal support workers and registered practical nurses experience physical violence at work, with 62% of those personal support workers and 51% of the nurses experiencing this violence on a weekly basis.
00:35:36 Speaker 2
When care is unpaid, it goes unrecognized and it gets squeezed into the time gaps left after paid work takes its toll.
00:35:44 Speaker 2
So in Canada, we have a legal history that tells the story of both workplace discrimination and inadequate provisions against primary caregivers.
00:35:52 Speaker 2
And I'm thinking here about parents, but also about caregivers for adult kin who are often much less recognized in labor norms around care.
00:36:01 Speaker 2
But there's also a story of hard won wins that have pushed back.
00:36:05 Speaker 2
against this discrimination.
00:36:07 Speaker 2
I recently had a chat with Queen's alum Annie Clifford, and she told me about the 2020 Supreme Court decision in the Fraser case, which was concerned with the rights of RCMP employees to buy back their pension for time when they were working reduced hours to take care of their children.
00:36:22 Speaker 2
So we want to recognize how difficult it is, but also recognize these wins.
00:36:28 Speaker 2
So we're talking about paid, unpaid care provisioning also for those who need care.
00:36:32 Speaker 2
It's often unavailable or insufficient.
00:36:34 Speaker 2
It can be slow to arrive and quick to leave.
00:36:37 Speaker 2
And needing care itself, that expression of need, especially long-term needs related to disability and illness, has long been associated with workplace discrimination.
00:36:48 Speaker 2
And of course, this is sort of the bad news slide, laying out the bad news.
00:36:52 Speaker 2
Just because it's difficult to rationalize care time with capitalist time, it doesn't mean that we don't try.
00:36:57 Speaker 2
So we do try.
00:36:58 Speaker 2
And when the nature of the work itself can't be bent, for example, personal support workers can't be replaced by AI because actual hands are needed to bathe, arms to steady, eyes to watch to see the shifting needs of the patient, it is the worker instead who must be bent.
00:37:15 Speaker 2
When pressed, care work can be disciplined to fit capitalist time, and the result is the conditions that shape so much paid work around the world.
00:37:24 Speaker 2
So because of this nature of care work, because it is so intimate, the impacts of time acceleration, intensification and extension, so all those things we were talking about when we were talking about the labor theory of value,
00:37:37 Speaker 2
Those feelings, although they happen in industries everywhere, they're felt more intimately and they can be more intimately violent than in other spheres of labor.
00:37:46 Speaker 2
So and this is so much so that the International Labor Organization actually defines care workers
00:37:53 Speaker 2
first by the substance of their work, but then two sentences later by all the problems that they face.
00:37:58 Speaker 2
It's in the very definition of the ILO's understanding of care work.
00:38:02 Speaker 2
So they say care workers share distinctive characteristics.
00:38:06 Speaker 2
They get into what these characteristics are.
00:38:08 Speaker 2
They display a range of skills.
00:38:09 Speaker 2
Although these are frequently neither recognized nor remunerated, they frequently experience tensions between those they care for and the conditions in which they have to provide care, and they are mostly women.
00:38:22 Speaker 2
So whether you're giving it or receiving it, the ill fit of capitalist time and care time can make the experience of care stressful, exhausting, and at its worst, violent.
00:38:32 Speaker 2
But what I argue in the book is that this isn't because care itself
00:38:37 Speaker 2
is inherently stressful, exhausting, or violent.
00:38:41 Speaker 2
It's because our life making labors are starved for time, and the time that is allocated to care is not properly valued.
00:38:48 Speaker 2
So it's a crisis of time, and the crisis is capitalism and other things, too.
00:38:54 Speaker 2
We're focusing on capitalism here.
00:38:56 Speaker 2
So these in a nutshell are the sets of themes that I'm working with in the book.
00:39:01 Speaker 2
And as I said, the first part of the book, it really gets into the tension between care time and capitalist time.
00:39:07 Speaker 2
And in the second part of the book, I trace it through a sort of a series of case studies that move us through the lifespan.
00:39:15 Speaker 2
And then the third part asks that big what is to be done question.
00:39:20 Speaker 2
I'm going to end with another excerpt, but I think I'll sort of say some of my concluding thoughts here first.
00:39:27 Speaker 2
And the first is just that I really appreciate you coming to the talk.
00:39:30 Speaker 2
As I said, it has a bit of a special meaning because the book's not done yet.
00:39:33 Speaker 2
So it's been very helpful to think through, what do I want to say about the book?
00:39:38 Speaker 2
And yeah, preparing for today has really done a lot to refine my thinking.
00:39:43 Speaker 2
I'm looking forward to talking to you all about the book, but I will read the second excerpt.
00:39:47 Speaker 2
I think I have
00:39:48 Speaker 2
Time, yeah.
00:39:50 Speaker 2
Time, time is the question.
00:39:54 Speaker 2
So the second excerpt that I chose is from a chapter on school time, so our K to 12 years.
00:40:01 Speaker 2
And this chapter was fun to write.
00:40:02 Speaker 2
I'd say it was one of, in terms of the research, one of the newest chapters for me.
00:40:08 Speaker 2
It allowed me to think about the school age years in a different way through the lens of work time and care time, and to consider how the competing compulsions
00:40:18 Speaker 2
that make up our school age years come together.
00:40:21 Speaker 2
And these compulsions that I'm thinking of are first of all, what is school?
00:40:26 Speaker 2
It frees up parents to work.
00:40:28 Speaker 2
Is it care for children?
00:40:30 Speaker 2
Is education care?
00:40:31 Speaker 2
Do we see those as the same thing?
00:40:33 Speaker 2
And also, is school work for children or is it preparing children for the future workforce?
00:40:38 Speaker 2
If it's all of those things, how does that come together?
00:40:41 Speaker 2
So I won't answer all those questions here, but I will read one more short excerpt.
00:40:48 Speaker 2
Let's see, do I have another slide?
00:40:50 Speaker 2
Another place filler slide.
00:40:53 Speaker 2
So the daily and seasonal rhythms of school days are one of the few institutional tempos that most of us share, from memories of our own childhood and for some of us, once again, as caregivers.
00:41:04 Speaker 2
Once children turn five or six, it's presumed that they should spend the bulk of their day times in school.
00:41:10 Speaker 2
In many countries, this presumption is turned into law.
00:41:14 Speaker 2
And certainly in countries around the world, children's education is framed as both a responsibility, so for governments to provide and for children to attend, and a right.
00:41:23 Speaker 2
In the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26 reads, everyone has the right to education.
00:41:29 Speaker 2
Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.
00:41:34 Speaker 2
Elementary education shall be compulsory.
00:41:36 Speaker 2
So since this declaration, school attendance has become a major international marker of social welfare.
00:41:42 Speaker 2
In other words, school attendance is often seen as a proxy for care.
00:41:46 Speaker 2
If you're sending your own kid to school, it probably means you're giving them good care.
00:41:50 Speaker 2
And at a larger level, if a country has high levels of school attendance, it means that the children are being cared for.
00:41:55 Speaker 2
That's that proxy that often gets used.
00:41:58 Speaker 2
Unlike early childhood care, so daycare, which is largely structured around parents' work time, school time centers the child, children's time and what we make of it.
00:42:09 Speaker 2
Schools are meant to prepare children for their adult lives.
00:42:12 Speaker 2
In other words, school time enables future time.
00:42:16 Speaker 2
With its deadlines and discipline, tables and tablets, in some ways it emulates work time.
00:42:22 Speaker 2
Learning at school becomes a proxy for work, both as practice for jobs to come and an actual investment in labor time now for the accumulation of value later.
00:42:32 Speaker 2
And yet school is also still very much a place of care.
00:42:35 Speaker 2
Writing as a parent of two children, school is care time that enables my work time.
00:42:41 Speaker 2
I probably wouldn't be given this talk if my children had not been successfully handed off to their teachers earlier today.
00:42:48 Speaker 2
And often the care teachers provide extends into our home lives.
00:42:51 Speaker 2
So I remember a few years ago when my older daughter Hattie was in grade 2, I had to pick her up for a dreaded vaccination appointment.
00:42:58 Speaker 2
Hattie's grade two teacher, who I am certain is Roald Dahl's Miss Honey in the Flesh, sent Hattie home with their classroom teddy bear and instructions to hold the bear tight during her appointment.
00:43:09 Speaker 2
This is just one example of the way in which school care extends into home time.
00:43:15 Speaker 2
School is brimming with care, but it's not care that sets the tempo or the timelines of our learning days.
00:43:21 Speaker 2
Because schools are not set up as a childcare service for working parents, though they play the part convincingly enough, there are all kinds of care gaps that pop into parents' working days.
00:43:31 Speaker 2
There are professional development days for teachers, class performances scheduled at 11 a.m., lunchtime parent-teacher meetings, and of course in North America, two full months of summer holiday.
00:43:42 Speaker 2
These scheduled pauses in childcare signal an expectation that there's someone at home who can step in when needed.
00:43:49 Speaker 2
Unscheduled pauses, like children's sick days or schools closed due to inclement weather, expect the same at a moment's notice.
00:43:56 Speaker 2
Most of the time it is women who close this care time gap.
00:44:00 Speaker 2
Where once women were expected to stay home and join the workforce in moments of crisis, like war, now they are expected to join the workforce and return home in moments of crisis.
00:44:11 Speaker 2
So political economists call the former the reserve army of labor, now women supply the reserve army of unwaged care.
00:44:19 Speaker 2
So I then in the chapter get into a discussion of the friction between the working day, which is, as we know, on average 8 hours and the school day, which is usually about 6 1/2 hours in Canada, and the different ways that caregivers manage that tension.
00:44:33 Speaker 2
And I write that this account of the friction between the work day and the school day could be mistaken as a parental tirade for longer school hours, a 9 to 5 for children to match the hours of their elders.
00:44:45 Speaker 2
But this is not so.
00:44:46 Speaker 2
The friction of so many 9am drop-offs is not the result of a mismatch between parents' time and children's time.
00:44:54 Speaker 2
It is instead, first, a tension between the present needs of capitalism, so the need to have parents who are free to go to their jobs, and the future needs of capitalism.
00:45:03 Speaker 2
The pressures of our workday today hitting the strange blend of learning, care, and training for future workers that is the school.
00:45:10 Speaker 2
And more pressingly, it's the friction of our lifetime hitting up against capitalist time.
00:45:16 Speaker 2
The parent who laments the brevity of the school day is likely the same parent who aches about the brevity of the evenings with their children.
00:45:25 Speaker 2
The school day feels short not because, or sorry, the school day does feel short because it is shorter than most caregivers' working days.
00:45:32 Speaker 2
But most caregivers do not choose their work hours, nor are their employers likely to shape those hours to suit childcare or elder care or any kind of care.
00:45:41 Speaker 2
Work time rarely bends to care time, but what if it did?
00:45:44 Speaker 2
Neither school hours nor working hours are fixed in place.
00:45:48 Speaker 2
The standard eight-hour workday is the result of hard-won worker struggles.
00:45:52 Speaker 2
And the six-hour school day emerged not as a platonic pedagogical ideal, but through a long social history of debate over how children should spend their days.
00:46:01 Speaker 2
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, governments in North America grew increasingly interested in how the children within their borders spent their days.
00:46:10 Speaker 2
Up until that point, schools were a combination of public, private, and church-run institutions, irregular in daily tempos and curriculum.
00:46:18 Speaker 2
But with rising industrialization came growing educational needs.
00:46:23 Speaker 2
As Allison Griffith and Dorothy Smith write, an educated labor force, not simply educated elite, was needed.
00:46:29 Speaker 2
So this growing of an educated labor force.
00:46:32 Speaker 2
The new interest in tracking school time then paralleled the rise in industrial clock time in North America with time discipline in the former as preparation for time discipline in the latter.
00:46:43 Speaker 2
In both countries, this is Canada and the United States, mandatory schooling was also driven by colonial interests enforcing education in indigenous communities in order to forcibly and often violently mold children in the image of the European settler.
00:46:57 Speaker 2
By the turn of the 20th century, and this is of course a history we all know, school was compulsory in the United States and Canada, and governments were increasingly interested in tracking and disciplining attendance across communities.
00:47:10 Speaker 2
So in those early years, a history we might not know as well is that many parents resisted schooling for reasons both economic and social.
00:47:17 Speaker 2
In the 19th century, rural schools especially tended to open and close with the seasonal rhythms of farming, with children coming and going as it suited the household.
00:47:26 Speaker 2
New mandatory schooling brought rhythms at odds with the daily tempos of North American livelihoods.
00:47:32 Speaker 2
While for the most part new school schedules operated with little attention to land-based and seasonal rhythms, summer vacation emerged as a reaction to the sweltering heat in the cities of 19th century America.
00:47:44 Speaker 2
Elite urban households of New York pushed for shorter school years to accommodate their escape to the country to avoid the sweltering summer heat.
00:47:52 Speaker 2
So in this way, the desires and the lives of middle and upper class families shaped the daily and seasonal tempos of schools.
00:47:59 Speaker 2
This was especially through the labors of these middle and upper class mothers who extended their household care into school meeting rooms and advocacy groups.
00:48:08 Speaker 2
But it was not elite families that found themselves the target of the new time discipline running through schools.
00:48:14 Speaker 2
In Canada, it was indigenous children and their communities who felt the heavy arm of the school clock most deeply and violently.
00:48:21 Speaker 2
Today, public schools continue to operate in tension with community rhythms, but Indigenous educators and advocates have also worked hard to turn schools into places of Indigenous care and learning.
00:48:31 Speaker 2
Some community-based schools have successfully established alternative tempos as well, tempos grounded in the land and community rhythms rather than echoes of the capitalist working day.
00:48:42 Speaker 2
So I wanted to close with this very brief history of the school day here to emphasize that the timeline of the school day and what happens in it is far from a foregone conclusion.
00:48:53 Speaker 2
These struggles remind us that all of it, so our working hours, the employment leaves that we can and cannot take, the rhythm of our inbox filling up every day, this is not any sort of natural clock, but rather it is time made by humans and time that can be remade.
00:49:11 Speaker 1
And I will end there.
00:49:12 Speaker 1
Thanks very much.