this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Explanation from the original post:
http://watchesbysjx.com/2020/07/time-consciousness-and-discipline-industrial-revolution.html?amp=1 is a decent article about the rise of time consciousness.
Excerpt: With wasted time being forgone potential output, factory owners developed an obsession with time. Contemporary accounts exist of factory owners who deliberately tampered with the clocks in their factories to slow them down, and thus gain more hours – and output – from their workers. Other employers hid the clocks altogether.
James Myles, writing in his 1850 autobiography, Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy, recalled his “masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night”.
I've had days at my work where I'll tell myself this has to be happening even though I know its not. Its crazy that it actually used to be a thing
Shitty people having power over others under them, even the craziest things happened at that time, like rich people in victorian time paying to get to the poorest regions of london to experience poverty. All thanks to craptalism.
It's all about control, from the RTO mandates to controlling the clock on the city center square. (I'm drunk)
We just need to get people to link RTO mandates and jury nullification in the public consciousness, and the problem will sort itself out.
Like, it'll be weird that the whole staff was in the office and not a soul saw how the CEO drowned in the toilet, but who has time to investigate little quirk of office life?
Right now you can get a very good paying Chinese factory job ($2000/mo) in Guangzhou making clothing for a "Shein" factory. Your hours: 11.5hrs/day in 3 shifts, 7 days/week, Sunday evening off. Benefits: 1-2 days off/mo., free room and meals.
goddamn that is brutal. If they were to work in 40-hour weeks instead, it would earn around half that much money which is around the wages of many east European or Balkan nations. But China is a glorious "socialist" nation otherwise.🙄
There are around 700,000 wild feral humans in the US fighting in a war to survive the element as hated prejudiced animals that would like this opportunity
Was this the impetus for the town clock?
Clock towers are way older than the industrial revolution and also occurred in quite a few different societies, so probably not as a general rule. There are a couple in England and France (Salisbury and Beauvais cathedrals) that are 700 years old, and if you include non-mechanical-clock timekeeping devices like sundials and water clocks then you can go back even further. I could imagine that it's quite possible that there was at least one instance where this was caught and people arranged for some kind of separate public clock, though
To add, I believe that town clocks probably also played a continuation of the church bells used to communicate the time to the village/town.
One of the main reasons Church bells and clock bells were so loud was to communicate to the area the current time.
Cool youtube video describing capitalists controlling clocks to make laborers work for longer hours.
I've finally came around to watching it and, oh boy, it is not good :-/ From the beginnig that are loaded statements about stone age people and their working habbits. I suggest reading Lars Svenden's "Work". I don't think it mentions clocks, but goes into the details of how work and worker rights have evolved from anciemt times. A short, 100-ish page book that gives you all the neccessary basics.
Thanks for the recommendation, just downloaded it and I'm going to read it at work hahahaha.
Some factories used to have piece rates.