Perspective. Give working lives more time to breathe. A plea for temporal drawing rights

Introduction

This is a plea to reconcile, in a gender-conscious manner, commodified labour and care work by facilitating life courses in which both men and women have ‘room, in the sense of time, to breathe’. ¹ Looming over the future of work are three trends in particular that cannot be explained here, at least in detail. First, an ‘overheated’ work culture (see the studies on quality of work and particularly on work intensity: Eurofound, 2024; Piasna, 2023; Piasna and Theodoropoulos, 2024), has lost sight of the necessity of time for satisfying personal and social care needs and desires. Second, both paid and unpaid care work remain socially undervalued and unprotected, which threatens to leave us stranded in a society lacking in care provision (Daly, 2001; Dowling, 2022; Jarvis, 2005). Finally, the gender divide (Rönnmar and Hayter, 2024) related to the first two trends is far from being closed. Under such conditions a time-aware working time policy has to try to improve the temporal conditions of all forms of work over the lifespan, and in a manner that eliminates gender discrimination. There are already laws and collective agreements going in this direction. Encouraging life courses that allow room to breathe by means of a so-called ‘time option model’ would mark a radical step in this direction. This draws on what Rehn (1977) and Supiot (1999) called ‘temporal drawing rights’. The objective of this working time policy is, rather than just to limit working time, to enhance freedom at work (Supiot, 1999) and thus open up more space to care for societal needs.

It is not easy to imagine that such a paradigmatic shift in labour policies could take place in countries and regions dominated by productivism and acceleration (Rosa, 2015). Labour and social policies here are accompanied and shaped by systematic work incentives, both positive and negative, which make biographical ‘deviations’ from a putative ‘normal’ life course ² risky and potentially subject to sanctions. A basic institutional factor determining life courses and gender roles is the predominance of the so-called ‘standard employment relationship’ (SER). In most labour laws and policies in the Western world, this institutional pattern privileges work in continuous employment and uninterrupted employment careers over non-commodified work, part-time or non-continuous employment (Mückenberger, 1985; Stone and Arthurs, 2013; Vosko, 2010). In this way, the life course is legally preformed and clearly focused on gender-typical patterns of a male breadwinner model, in the sense of gainful employment and family work under the material dominance of gainful male employment.

This labour-centred and gendered framework of social and labour policy (Leisering, 2023) goes together with a spirit of capitalism in both its inherited (Weber, 2001) and its modern transformative form (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). In both forms, the spirit of capitalism tends to give rise to a work culture of ‘productivism’ that is hostile to care, marginalising non-commodified care work and strengthening conventional gender roles. Any potential improvement in work, care and gender culture would thus require an assessment and reshaping of these institutional conditions. Ending this bias has serious implications for working time policy.

This essay tries to develop conceptual considerations for a time-conscious re-regulation of working time (Section 2) and outlines normative principles and concrete steps for their implementation (Section 3). Recent, mainly German examples from collective bargaining and social legislation are presented. This is followed by some reflections on the perspectives and the relationship to other time-shaping policies of such a new life course-oriented working time policy (Section 4).

The case for life course and gender-related working time policy

In contrast to purely numerical working time reduction, the approach based on ‘temporal drawing rights’ suggests dedicating a substantial part of the time allotted to gainful employment to other societal needs (education, personal and social care, civil society volunteering and so on), and at the same time mainstreaming gender equality. It tends to systematically ‘co-impact’ both time spent working in gainful employment and time spent working beyond it. The approach was first developed to deal with the relationship between work and vocational training/education (Boulin, 2020; Rehn, ³ 1977). It called into question the current way we divide time between gainful employment and care work (references in Mückenberger, 2007). The idea was to reconcile the employment and temporal needs of personal and family life (Supiot, 1999). It also necessarily brought to the fore gender relations in both paid and unpaid work, thereby contributing to ‘the search for a new time policy’ (as the subtitle of a volume edited by Steinrücke et al. (2001) put it).

The ‘drawing rights’ approach is related to ‘time policy’ insofar as it systemically takes into account the interconnectedness of working time and time beyond paid work, as well as the gender aspects of both types of work. Temporal drawing rights limit the number of gainful working hours, but they also affect how the two modes of work, their substance and their assignment of gender roles are organised. The aim, as Supiot (1999) put it, is freedom at work rather than only freedom from work; or, as Trentin (1997), an Italian trade union leader and philosopher, called it, the ‘città del lavoro’, freely translated as the ‘republic of work’. The approach governs working time from the ground up in connection and correspondence with time allotted to personal and social care. ⁴ It thus takes account of the human life course, with its different needs and ruptures, and its status transitions over time. It aims to improve the temporal conditions of all forms of work over the lifespan, in a manner that enhances and stabilises quality of life and eliminates gender discrimination. It tries to understand, accept and express this temporal interconnectedness and addresses both types of work in their gendered aspects over the different phases of the life course.

This article extrapolates this working time strategy oriented towards drawing rights and the internal work mechanisms (in the broadest sense). Many examples have emerged in the history of European legislation and collective bargaining, inspired by a comprehensive time-policy understanding of the human life course.

Forerunner Sweden has been copied in many other countries (Jarvis, 2005). Parental leave drawing rights have been accompanied by adequate wage replacement and so-called ‘daddy days’, thereby giving rise to the so-called ‘employed mother model’ (Leira, 1992). It was intended to directly combine the reshaping of working time (including working time reduction) with an equality-oriented impact on gender relations. ⁵ This re-regulation of working time has been expanded all over Europe.

Parental leave drawing rights affect how men and women may organise their everyday lives. They do so through indirect regulation, creating ‘options’ (instead of rules) for parental leave, including incentives (for example, increasing the number of months of paid parental leave if both parents use them). Clearly expressing the complex objective of working time and gender equality policy makes it easier to determine whether and to what extent it has been possible to achieve the objective of reallocating care responsibilities in a gender conscious manner.

These measures do not necessarily concern working time and working time reduction issues. Rather they are responses to such problematic developments as the overheating of work culture and the care crisis. In recent decades, particularly in collective bargaining, a qualitative emphasis has (re-)emerged focusing on the physical well-being and integrity of workers themselves and/or (in the case of personal services) their clients. A groundbreaking German collective agreement was the 1973 framework agreement in the Baden-Württemberg metal industry, which provided for optional ‘bathroom breaks’, while also limiting the pace of work, for example, by providing for minimum times allotted to work tasks at conveyor belts (see Steinkühler et al., 1986). Laws and agreements (for example, in the German chemical industry) provided for the adaptation of working conditions to the needs of older workers. ⁶ Collective agreements have been concluded in some hospitals, child-care facilities, schools and universities on staffing and the quality of services to be provided to users. ⁷ This has affected working time in these institutions.

What these measures have in common is that they qualitatively affect people’s psycho-physical conditions (as both service providers and service users), not just money or time. They are related to care issues and ‘humanise’ conditions both inside and outside the employment relationship. They are not linked directly to working time regulation, but they do embody a notion of decent work that encompasses both the substance and temporal framing of work.

When working people interrupt their working time (daily, weekly, yearly, lifetime) in pursuit of another societally recognised objective, the two spheres of working life – one commodified, the other not – confront one another. This seems to open up opportunities to bring about some sort of communication between the two value systems and possibly to attenuate productivism in the commodified sphere, along with its gender-hierarchical dominance over the non-commodified sphere. In that way, care values, mindfulness and their gendered assignment can gain the ascendance, not just as elements of ‘private life’, but also as a sort of standing reproach or criticism of commodified labour.

The time component has gained momentum in recent German model collective agreements, particularly in a ‘drawing rights’ direction. The chemical industry, as early as from 2008, provides long-term time accounts for employees to encourage lifelong learning, the adaptation of work and working time to the needs of elderly workers, and flexible transitions between gainful work, professional training and retirement. Within the railway industry, it was agreed in 2016 that employees should have the option of drawing free time instead of higher wages, and this time option was chosen surprisingly often (56 per cent of respondents). In February 2018, metal industry collective bargaining, after agreeing on a model providing time and a savings-account for vocational training in 2015, created proper drawing rights for care: on top of the option of taking free days (up to six days a year) instead of higher wages, employees could choose more time (two days more) when ‘drawing’ this time for care purposes or to recover from shift work. Thus part of gainful working time explicitly became dedicated to care, by means of drawing rights. The recent (April 2025) civil service collective agreement also provides time options for communal employees: from 2026 onwards, the so-called 13th month annual wage may be taken instead in the form of free time, of up to three days a year.

These collectively agreed measures have much in common. They create time options through drawing rights. The trade union negotiators were influenced to a considerable extent by large-scale membership surveys in which support for time options was surprisingly strong. The take-up rate (as a measure of acceptance of this type of working time policy) was unexpectedly high.

Whereas numerical working time reductions pursue mainly quantitative goals (securing jobs by reducing working hours in the company or just increasing free time), time policy via drawing rights pursues mainly qualitative goals (although they may include quantitative ones). The approach may concern the working world of employees (for example, more time for recreation, communication or training or education) and employees’ extra-occupational life (time for care, parenting, culture, health, education, volunteering, neighbourhood assistance or sabbatical). It is aimed at the ‘whole of work’ (that is, gainful employment in the context of work beyond employment under particular gender and generational relations) (DGfZP, 2005). It can thus address the structure and meaning of gainful employment and non-commodified working life as interrelated and malleable. As a form of working time reduction, it builds a bridge to job security because time-related drawing rights simultaneously reduce the amount of the supplied working time on offer.

Further steps towards time-conscious working time re-regulation

In what follows, proposals will be presented on what further working time re-regulation might look like that takes into account temporal drawing rights, addressing working time in connection with the problems of current work culture, the care crisis and gender inequity. These considerations are not empirical, but normative in nature. They refer to current work culture, with its negative external effects, for example, on families, and the resulting gendered care crisis, not as something given, but as something to be changed. Of course, this normative stance requires justifiable normative criteria. The considerations oppose current (gendered) trends in work culture and societal care provision. They regard the current world of work and the working practices of people and organisations as misguided, exerting harmful effects on men and women and society as a whole. The need for correction with normative guidance is therefore urgent.

Steps toward reorganisation of working time

Two features in particular may be noted in relation to this attempt to allow employees room to breathe in their life course, facilitated by temporal drawing rights. As already mentioned, it pursues qualitative goals, whether in relation to employees’ working lives or their lives outside work, treating all work – that is, paid work and non-commodified work – as interrelated and malleable. It is therefore life course-oriented in the sense that it tries to take into account different phases and gender differentiations throughout employees’ lives and the time needs stemming from them.

In this way, this approach promises to contribute to freedom at work as opposed to mere freedom from work. It holds out the prospect of enabling employees simultaneously to help design their working and living environments, with a view to bringing working and living, work and care – which have been alienated from each other by functional separation and gender hierarchisation – into mutual exchange and thus susceptible to mutual influence.

What we need today are models – also of working time policy – and well-evaluated experiments that offer alternatives to the self-destructive tendencies of working society we mentioned at the outset. These should take into consideration the ‘de-commodification’ and ‘decoupling’ of gainful employment and social security, of the kind developed here using the care time drawing rights model. There is no room here to consider other important approaches, such as transitional labour markets (Anxo et al., 2007; Gazier, 2002), universal basic income (Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017) or work-life insurance (Schmid, 2020). Such alternatives must be properly thought through and modelled in terms of how they could support an approach inspired by a time policy that takes into account work culture, societal care needs and the overarching requirements of gender equality.

This certainly holds equally for the system of life courses with ‘room to breathe’ and drawing rights envisaged here. For example, it is still largely uncertain how compatibility can be achieved with economic or business criteria; how it could be ensured that the new time option mode does not lead to further gender or social divides; how the free-rider problem can be overcome; and how paradoxical and self-destructive life plans could be reconciled with it, to name just a few examples. But there must certainly be a future for the model of life courses with time to breathe and drawing rights as a lifelong instrument and element of working time reduction oriented towards freedom at work, and as a means of shaping the world of work in a more both time- and gender-conscious way. It is well worth persevering to improve its design and to allow it opportunities for societal experimentation.