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WHO DOES TIME BELONG TO ...
Hint: It's a trick question.
No matter how many methods of precision we use to measure time, we can never actually hold it. Though we continue to commodify it, time doesn't actually belong to anyone - no one is entitled to it and no one can control it.
Grief is one of the greatest teachers of this lesson. We can experience it every day, any time, with a little consciousness and intention. Though it seems like a human right to be able to do this, the reality is that we live within systems that encourage the opposite. Despite the fact that time belongs to no one, our labor and wage systems imply that time belongs to someone else, and the harms of extraction and exploitation unfold from there.
Putting a currency amount on a person's time is important to confer value on their labor. It grants a form of autonomy to operate within the capitalist system, exchanging labor for wealth, and wealth for the goods necessary to live well and care for yourself and your loved ones. In the process, the system reveals its many holes and weaknesses - including undervaluing of labor that leads to enslavement, death, or a sense of entrapment, withholding other forms of benefit or care (i.e. 'as long as I'm paying you, your time is mine'), and assigning other forms of control or threat beyond healthy performance standards (i.e. 'my value is defined by my paycheck').
Our carceral system relates to our employment system, the threads of which are all touched by the human enslavement upon which our U.S. empire is built. Incarcerated people face inhuman barriers to earning a wage - in an article for the Atlantic, "American Slavery Reinvented," Whitney Benns writes, "According to a representative from [Angola] prison, those working in the field make between two and twenty cents an hour. …Incarcerated workers have not reaped the benefits of the labor movement over the course of the past century, in large part because they are not understood to be 'employees.' " They face additional barriers to acquire valuable skills while 'doing time,' to access recovery programs, and to achieve employment after release - all things that reduce recidivism, if made accessible.
Meanwhile, many of us outside of prisons feel jailed by our jobs, the value of our time devolving into a threat toward our future well being - if we don't perform well, if we can't 'hold onto' our jobs, if we are not seen as valuable by our employer, it's seen as a failure of the individual. Toi Smith writes that "work life balance" is not "universally accessible advice...Because for most people, work isn't a mindset issue. It's not a 'boundary problem.' It's a condition of survival."
When we treat time as something we can commodify and exploit, we treat it like a body. What if the body of time - its being or spirit - was something we could be in relationship to, in a different way? Instead of trying to own that body, we could think about what we want our relationship to look like, how we want our interactions with time to feel. Engaging in an unhealthy relationship with time, we harm ourselves. Think of the punishing feeling of rushing to arrive somewhere, to finish something on a deadline, to deliver something to a waiting customer...when so many people are trapped by the definition of time that their employer, or the state, imposes on them, how can we be more aware of the harm that takes place - on any scale, in every one of our lives - to interrupt the cycle?
When time is mistreated, people are mistreated...and mistreating ourselves is a way of mistreating others. The more we can recognize and name those systems, the more room we make in our thinking to expand how we participate in them and how we can consider doing it differently.
In How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith writes,
"As we drove toward the exit of the prison, the sun cast a late-autumn shadow of our bus along the fields. From the window, we saw a group of two dozen men in white-and-blue sweatshirts with garden hoes methodically rising in their hands and then falling to the earth. Their bodies were set against a backdrop of trees that had tumbled into autumn, draping them in a volcanic sea of red and orange. It had been one thing to see Black men laboring in the fields of Angola in photographs but it was quite different to see it in person. The parallel with chattel slavery made it seem as if time was bending in on itself. There was no need for metaphor, the land made it literal. I wanted so desperately to ask the bus driver to stop, to be able to get off the bus and go speak with these men. I don’t know what I would have said. I wanted voices to add texture to the images these men had become. I wanted them to be more than their bodies. More than flesh and fields and tools and emblems of a history no one here seemed willing to sit with. I did not want to remember them as a silence.”
No matter how much we witness the silencing and erasure of people's value, the ways in which systems of power attempt to own the time of other people is no more 'normal' or 'inevitable' or 'necessary' than it is to own people's bodies. Anyone whose relationship to time has been stolen from them knows that it's not possible to 'take back' that time. But can we change our relationship to time in a way that benefits others?
We founded GFJ not on avoiding work defining us, but on embracing it, asking the question of how work can define us toward transformation of people and planet. It's a privilege to choose your work, but whether you have a choice or not, we all live within a system that encourages ownership of time. We are here to find our way out of platitudes and toward a radical shift - because radical things are often quite small, especially when enacted in community - and to welcome others into that shift. To find a way, through acknowledgment of what we are facing, to work together to change our relationship to something integral to the labor system we are all a part of, in one way or another.
In solidarity,
Dor + Tay
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