Capitalization of Working Time
Time saving involves, since its emergence in the middle of the1990’s, a growing share of the industrialized countries’employees. Two major kinds of time capitalization exist. The first, thetime banks, allow accumulating and swapping of time within a community.The second, are the companies’ time saving accounts, which offerthe possibility for the employees to accumulate and manage, throughaccounts, their working time. Our article deals with this last kind oftime saving with an empirical study of companies’ bargaining andindividual practices. We propose to question working timecapitalization as a diversification of work temporalities and socialtimes, inherited from industrialization. First we will describe thetemporalities’ individualisation process that provides theemployees with the ability, but also the responsibility and the riskassociated with the social times conciliation. Then we will supportthat this process does not produce atomization, but gathers differentcategories of employees around their time practices. Finally, wepropose a reflexion on the role that capitalisation plays on thesecularisation process of temporal norms, with the principle of timeand money reversibility.