Teresa Bücker: “All_time. A question of power and freedom” – culture

When Robert Habeck recently complained that his employees were overworked at an industry congress, the fact that a high-ranking politician publicly addressed the consequences of permanent professional stress was less surprising than the fact itself. However, Habeck’s Ministry of Economics is no exception: According to a study by the German Federation of Trade Unions from 2019, 53 percent of employees often or very often feel under time pressure during work. For most people, after going home, it is not a phase of relaxation that begins, but of household chores and childcare. According to surveys, parents of young children do more than 60 hours of paid and unpaid work per week. Three quarters of the mothers of underage children cannot recover sufficiently from the stress.

The feminist journalist Teresa Bücker takes alarming numbers like these as a starting point in her non-fiction book “Alle_Zeit” to paint a picture of a country in constant stress, which leads to blatant neglect of personal needs, restricts individual freedom and endangers health. As a consequence, Bücker calls for a new category of socio-political debates and decisions: time. She wasn’t the first to come up with this idea, but that doesn’t lessen the urgency of her appeal. Its strength lies in the fact that Bücker does not just add the problem of time to the long list of construction sites and perspectives that dominate contemporary political discourse. Instead, she locates it at the root of other hot topics.

Only a third of all children think their fathers have enough time for them

This succeeds in the case of the gender equality debate, for example: Here, Bücker immediately identifies the demand of unconditionally performance-oriented lean-in feminism for better career opportunities for (strong) women as insufficient. After all, that’s not to say that women won’t continue to do most of the household chores – they just do it at the end of long working days. The core problem is more fundamental: the temporal incompatibility of work, household and family, let alone free time and political commitment. Because time, unlike money, cannot be increased, Bücker sees the solution in redistributing it. What she has in mind becomes clear when she cites the four-in-one perspective of the sociologist Frigga Haug as a model of contemporary everyday life: every adult should have four hours a day for paid work, care work, self-care and socio-political commitment.

Instead of banknotes, Bücker does not elevate hours to the new currency of prosperity, but instead focuses on the quality of the time experienced. Studies that calculate “time confetti” distributed throughout the day, such as the ten minutes between the changing table and supper, as free time do not do justice to the feelings of those affected. People need sufficiently connected periods of time for their tasks and needs. Here it becomes clear how the problem of time extends beyond the question of gender equality: Almost half of all parents in Germany are most affected by a lack of time in everyday life. Only four percent of men who care for relatives work reduced hours. Only a third of all children think their fathers have enough time for them.

Bücker also shows the importance of time as a political and cultural factor for participation in democratic life: three quarters of those who have never volunteered cite a lack of time as the reason for this. Among the volunteers, 60 percent only spend one to two hours a week. Bücker rightly asks how much such “small donations” achieve, and notes: You also have to be able to afford to get involved.

The same applies to self-care. Here Bücker designs an ideal everyday life that contains unplanned time in which one can forget the time and immerse oneself in moments of flow, personal fulfilment, development and meaningfulness. That has a completely different sound than the unculture of overwork, atypical working hours and constant availability, especially in the home office.

In Germany, after-hours work amounts to 900,000 additional full-time jobs

The question arises as to whether all of this doesn’t fit perfectly with the fact that 80 percent of employees in Europe would like to have a four-day week, with a working time of just 20 hours, depending on the study. The counter-arguments are obvious: the working hours have already been halved compared to the daily 16 hours that were common 200 years ago. Didn’t the employees just get whiny? Bücker counters that working hours have not generally decreased, but diffused: on the one hand towards mini jobs, on the other towards overtime. In Germany, after-hours work amounts to an annual volume of 900,000 additional full-time jobs. Couldn’t these and other hours be distributed in such a way that both the wishes for urgent relief and for more than just marginal employment were fulfilled?

The question of how to finance the sacrifice of working hours weighs even more heavily, especially in times of rising prices. Bücker replies that the money is definitely there, but that the profits generated should go less to the companies and more to their employees. Then, thanks to higher wages, they could scale back their workload. She also brings into play a minimum wage per week or month that is independent of the number of hours worked, as well as “a waiver of age limits for student loans, appropriately paid training periods and voluntary services or an unconditional basic income”. All of these suggestions should be considered, but remain inevitably (it’s the book of a social critic, not a government program) in the one-should-sphere. The clout of “Alle_Zeit” lies in its basic idea, which challenges us to question the grueling rhythm of our everyday life as a whole. The fact that we are finally doing this is not only due to Bücker’s book, but to all of us.