Our working lives are about to change. Time, and the PM, will tell if we’re better off

In 2011, Justin Timberlake starred in a science fiction movie called In Time. In the bleak future of the film, citizens traded not money, but time. The logic of this dystopian economy was simple: if you accumulated more time, you lived longer. If you ran out of time, you died.

The film came to mind after the prime minister added a sharp new line to his repertoire. Justifying his recent tax changes, he said those who live off wages or salaries deserved the chance to buy a house just as much as those who got their money in other ways – from inheritance, say, or investments. This is how he described workers: “Most Australians have nothing to sell but their time. Nothing to give but their hard work.”

At first glance, this reads like a straightforward description of reality. But if we stare at it a little longer, the phrase becomes interesting – because of the ways it does, and does not, match reality. Deliberately or not, Anthony Albanese has highlighted one of the central political issues of this era.

We know we are paid for our work. And we know that this work requires time. How many of us, though, think of ourselves as “selling our time”? My suspicion is we usually feel as though we are paid for the work itself, the completion of tasks. The time is necessary, but is not the product itself.

I wonder if this is a way of comforting ourselves for the sadder truth. There is something intangibly bleak, isn’t there, about “selling time”? So bleak, in fact, that it served as the basis for a dystopian movie. Suddenly, the trade-off is there for all to see: I will sell you a chunk of my life. Exchanging services for cash sounds like a reasonable negotiation. Albanese’s phrasing brings it back to a brutal equation: money in exchange for the finite years I have left.

That’s the way in which the description is accurate. And yet the ways it is not quite right are still less cheerful. Gig workers, say: because payments vary depending on demand, they have little control over the price at which their time sells. And in fact, this is true of many of the rest of us, too. Phones and emails mean that where once our jobs filled weekdays, they now fill weeknights, weekends, spare moments. On this measure, the amount you are paid to give away an hour of your life has been dropping for years (this is more true still because of the decline in real wages).

So the amount we are paid to give away an hour of our lives has dropped. But perhaps the more insidious fact is that we have lost even the power that selling one’s time confers. After all, if we don’t know how much our time sells for, is that really what we’re selling? Or are we, instead, being paid for the willingness to do whatever is put in front of us – however long it takes, however hard the work? Really, we have sold our lives and are grateful for whatever we snatch back. (Labor’s “right to disconnect” laws began to grapple with this.)

If this is not bad enough on its own, it is also, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin, a central cause of the gap between what men and women are paid. Because many jobs have come to reward availability, couples with children will often make sure one is available to work long hours – while the other works less in order to make that possible. Unsurprisingly, men are usually the ones who get to focus on their careers. So the new working life is costing all of us – and women in a very literal way.

Are shorter working hours still an option? They should be: Australians do terribly on international work-life balance comparisons. We also work more than we did 40 years ago. Historian Sean Scalmer, author of A Fair Day’s Work: The Quest to Win Back Time, has made these points, while arguing that a battle to reduce working hours has been central to this country’s history. At least until recently, when that fight was “channelled into two much more contained policy disputes”: over flexibility and parental leave. Important fights, but with a far narrower scope.

Interestingly, Scalmer argues that, historically, this worked best not when pursued in isolation, but as part of social movements, “moored in a vision of a better, transformed life”. So it is interesting to watch as unions begin again to ask for a shorter working week, tied to the introduction of artificial intelligence: reduced hours as one part of a dramatically changed society.

Next week, Albanese will deliver a speech about AI. There is much discussion of whether the new technology will drive a new era of economic growth. But underneath this lie fundamental questions of equity: will everyone benefit or will inequality widen further? Is this an area the government is willing to tackle?

Interestingly, Abundance, that book allegedly adored by Cabinet, suggests – a little unwittingly – that AI should be directly tied to redistribution. The book begins with a utopian description of a life in which people work far less, because “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared”. The book skates over questions of redistribution – and yet as economic historian Trevor Jackson points out, “translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed”.

Centre-left governments around the world are at a complicated moment: trying to break free from this era in which we are all busy, all the time, with unclear rewards for that busyness – but without a clear vision to offer as replacement.

In the past two months, the Albanese government showed it is willing to redistribute money. As we all head into an AI-dominated future, which may or may not resemble some sort of dystopian film, it will be interesting to see how willing governments – around the world and here – are to take on the task of redistributing time as well.

Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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