Taking it Home With You: Work, Free Time, and Domination

The politics of working time are experiencing a return to historical form, with proposals for a four-day working week, a right to disconnect, and other similar policies being taken more seriously than they have in decades. But in comparison, the normative side of this programme has been neglected. Justifications for individual policies aimed at working time sit uncomfortably with one another, and an extremely wide range of purported benefits have been canvassed. Here, I want to make a case that remains undeveloped in the literature: that the increase and protection of non-work time would reduce the domination of workers by their employers and should be supported on that basis. After surveying the existing normative literature, I argue that the promotion of non-domination gives us direct and indirect arguments for reducing working time, and for protecting the boundary between work and non-work time.