Set your alarm clock early

Time is our most basic human resource. It is our life: indeed it is the only true resource that we who are alive now have. And we all have a limited amount of it: our time will end. How we 'spend' our time – and what it gives and takes from us – are the sum of our life-times.

Australians are giving more and more time to paid work. Where children are present, our households often include two earners, and actual hours of work are amplified by the extra time it takes getting to and from work, catching up on work at home, and recovering from it; especially among those who feel that work is becoming more demanding and intensive. In this light, working time is about more than the hours we give to it: it is also about how those hours affect us, and the additional time demands that arise beyond the formal hours of work.

Australians start work young, and we increasingly work into old age. Our governments want us to work more, to work longer into old age, to be more productive and to increase our skills for work. At the same time, they want us to maintain or increase our population, contribute to a strong social fabric, raise our children well, care for our aged, and shrink our carbon footprint – a footprint that is powerfully shaped by the patterns and habits of our work, our social obligations and households, and our commuting between them.

Work maketh the Australian citizen

Readiness to work is increasingly a requirement for access to public support. Prime Minister Julia Gillard reveres 'decent, hard working' citizens. As her 2011 Whitlam Address shows, hard work is at the heart of her vision:

To work hard, to set your alarm clock early, to ensure your children are in school. We are the party of work not welfare, that's why we respect the efforts of the brickie and look with a jaundiced eye at the lifestyle of the socialite ... This is our continuing culture, born in Barcaldine and Balmain, the culture of mateship and the fair go, hard work and respect.

Making work central to moral worth in twenty-first century Australia in this way, perfectly illustrates the kind of 'labourist' society we have become. Over the twentieth century of 'labouring man' – as Guy Standing puts it – we have moved rapidly from clamour for the rights of labour, into an era promoting the right to labour, and ending with the call for a duty to labour. This duty now saturates twenty-first century Australian life.

To place work at the core of citizenship pushes life activities that are 'not work' into the shade: they are less worthy, they deserve a 'jaundiced eye'. To give work such weight implies an obligation to understand the terms of work and its wider effects. Not all work is the same, and not all non-work activities are on a par with the 'lifestyle of the socialite': parenting, rest, sleep, learning, caring for each other, participation in all kinds of social and community activity. If the only use of our time that is worth venerating is hard work, what of the rest of life? What kind of society does this make us? And what confidence can we have that such a hard working society will be a happy one, with healthy children, workers, workplaces and communities? If the hard workers of Labor's historic heartlands (Barcaldine and Balmain) are fatigued, stretched and overworked, and living in communities where more households are similarly stretched, what are the implications for social well-being? Work is not always, in itself, a social good. It is time to take a closer look.

Work maketh the man – and woman?

And what is the gender of this decent, hard working citizen? At Barcaldine and Balmain it was a man. Women's participation rate in paid work is now almost equal to that of men in Australia. The fruit of the post-1970s second wave women's liberation has been women's right – now indeed, a requirement – to join men in their work citizenship. This is a revolution. But unfortunately, only half of one. The 'culture of mateship and the fair go, hard work and respect' that Prime Minister Gillard suggests arrives with work, does not quite reach to the fair redistribution of domestic work, the elimination of wage discrimination, the underpayment of carers, the removal of sexual harassment at work or the double load of putting together a 'decent hard working job' with the care of children or others. As Eva Cox puts it in her 2011 International Women's Day speech, this is just 'equality on male terms'. Venerating work as the source of decency and sourcing citizenship through it, entitles women to exhaustion alongside the important positives of a pay packet and economic independence. This is not quite the equality that 1970s liberationists had in mind: becoming male and joining the Balmain mob. A second revolution is required if women are to join men in real, effective, equal citizenship and it involves spheres of achievement and effort beyond paid work: in the home, community, and social life.

Some of the hottest political debates of our times link to these issues: how we use our time, how working time should be regulated, how to give enough time to care well for our young and ageing populations, how to find the time for life-long education and skill development, and work participation over the life-cycle, and how to find the time to respond to environmental challenges.

How are we organising and experiencing our life 'times' now, and with what implications for the quality of our community, environmental and social lives? How should we organise ourselves in the future? Are we sitting on a time bomb, where demands on our time and energy simply outrun the resources we can bring to them? How conscious are we about how we are spending our lifetimes? Are some of us – like the proverbial boiled frog – unthoughtfully climbing into the work vat, only to find ourselves diabolically over-heated over time, urged on by our politicians, bosses and powerful, internalised social norms? And how do experiences differ – between women and men, between rich and poor, by occupation, age, generation and suburb?

Work giveth and work taketh away

Work clearly gives us a great deal: it sustains us and our homes and communities. It creates a sense of efficacy, skill and meaning for many. But it takes as well. What it gives and takes, and for whom, and with what consequences, is the concern of this book. For some, and perhaps for whole sections of our society, especially the less powerful and those who need care, the consequences of work and its fit with the rest of our lives, tick away like a time bomb.

In this circumstance, our true wealth is not measured in the economics of Gross National Product but in the enjoyment of our life-times and the avoidance of overloaded lives. Perhaps the most basic measure of the potential for happiness lies in...