What is deadtime?

What in the hell … :: … is deadtime? :: March :: 2006. Nate posts about deadtime. He views deadtime as something like what underlies remunerated time but which ultimately is incommensurable with it, something like the human cost or like the loss of an ability to do more or other in the future. In the comments, he offers the following terrific specification (there is more here, well worth looking at).

I think of it this way. We might plot a grid or make table, with two axes: productive for us, productive for the boss.

1. Some time is productive for us and not the boss.
2. Some time is productive for us and for the boss.
3. Some time is productive for the boss and not for us.
4. Some time is productive neither for us nor for the boss.

It must be noted, of course, that placement in one or the other position is not automatic (rather it’s the subject of conflict), nor uncontroversial (productive in what sense, and who gets to decide) nor final (disasters of all sorts might prevent the realization of value advanced, or strip us of what we’ve gained; enclosure - whether involuntary in the classical sense or voluntary in the sense of a contract to sell the novel/thesis/painting/album/etc that we’ve already made - might render something unproductive for the boss into something productive for the boss, etc).

I would call #4 deadtime, though at least some things under #3 is in many way deadtime too. #4’s the one I most had in mind. We might say this is the result of excess or gratuitous command or violence on capital’s part, or on the part of the local instantiation thereof. For instance, fulltime organizing staff at some unions and other NGOs are worked to death (I don’t mean this entirely metaphorically, longterm/lifetime staff tend to die in their mid 50s, anecdotally), in a way that causes high turnover (and as a result loss of productive knowledges and skills and contacts), employee discontent, and less productive work sometimes to the point where it’s not only less efficient per hour but less efficient in terms of the total quantity of work that gets done. People are sometimes simply too tired and stressed and sick to do the work well. That’s deadtime - when the bosses are killing us and it doesn’t even benefit them.

Comments

[djd]

I knew there was a disturbance in the force when I woke up this morning.

[Nate]

Thanks Jodi. You're kind.

[Nate]

Dammit. I hit the button before I was done. I also wanted to add: I don't see it as in relation specifically to remunerated time but to the aggregate time, both ostensibly remunerated and unremunerated, that gets stolen from us and the aggregate time that is value productive.

Value productive time, to my mind, consists of both remunerated and unremunerated components (and what is and is not remunerated is a matter and result of conflict).
The idea of deadtime implies in addition that value productive time is a subset of stolen time but stolen time is not reducible to value productive time, stolen time is value productive time and deadtime.

I'm not sure about a lot of this, but among what it suggests is that considering the wage - what it is and some of the politics of it - might be a fruitful avenue of inquiry (inquiry that's of course been started, though I'm not very familiar with raelly anything along those lines).

take care,
Nate