cover image Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century

Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century

Pietro Basso. Verso, $27 (275pp) ISBN 978-1-85984-565-3

Increased leisure time is supposedly one of the hallmarks of a modern economy, but this biting polemic argues that unfortunately, this isn't true. Drawing on a wealth of statistical data, Basso shows that in recent decades, despite productivity gains, work hours have held steady in the developed world, and have even crept up in the United States and Japan. In the newly industrializing countries, 19th-century conditions prevail, with 12-hour workdays the standard, and some Vietnamese factory workers pulling shifts of 24 straight hours. The pace and""density"" of work have also increased as automation and""just-in-time"" production techniques wring every second of downtime from the hectic workday. Meanwhile, the dwindling of free time and the spread of night and weekend work and irregularly scheduled shifts have wrought havoc with family and social life. These problems have been treated elsewhere, particularly in Juliet Schor's The Overworked American, which Basso cites. He adds a Marxist interpretation: the trend toward overwork, he asserts, is an ineluctable feature of capitalism; whatever leisure time we enjoy has come through the efforts of the labor movement. Basso writes just like Marx, for good and ill. His prose sometimes flounders in Marxist cant. But he also has a broad conception of the interpenetration of economy and society, and directs a scabrous wit at the sacred cows of management theory (especially incisive is his critique of""Toyotaism,"" as he calls the""totalitarian"" regimen of the supposedly harmonious Japanese workplace). His vision of the enduring struggle between capitalists, who view time as a brute factor of production, and workers, for whom it is life itself, raises a formidable challenge to the reigning orthodoxies of neo-liberal market ideology.