Time and Space

1. The ideology that time is money or that time equals money is necessary to support the structure of a capitalist economy. With private ownership of the means of production or the ability to own a business, capitalism will create separations in the wealth of the society. People who can afford to start a business vs. those who can’t. The people that can’t afford to start a business are then forced to work for people who do. Since the owner of the business must spend money to get the business started, the owner feels they should make more money then the employees they have working for them. So instead of the employee’s making a percentage of the things produced, the employees are paid for the amount of time they spent producing the products. This allows companies to charge far more for the products their employees produce then what it costs to produce them. If the employees were paid a percentage of what the market value of a product was there would be much less money for the owner. If the ideology of time is money was nonexistent, the employee would not be “kept in there place” and would question why they make so little money and the owners so much.

Along with the power to kept people in their place within the business, the notion of time is money is a powerful ideology that controls how work is done within the business as well. When jobs pay hourly as apposed to per-product-produced, the company expects workers to work in a different manner. When one is “one the clock” one is expected to be working the entire time. This ideology is interesting because both the worker and the owner can abuse hourly paid positions. For example, one summer I worked for a privately owned landscaping company, and every time we took a break, even for fifteen minutes, money was deducted out of our paychecks. That same summer my friend got a job working landscaping for the city, and when he told me about his work expectations I was blown away. At his job, money was not even taken out of his check for his half hour lunch break, which in fact was always around 2 hours long. Through this example I believe we can see that the ideology of time is money can be used to exploit the worker as well as the owner (or the taxpayer in this case).