The Social Stratification of Time. Time Analysis and Social Justice

The debate on the rhythms of social and political life has been growing over the last few decades. Frictions in various countries and for various reasons have caused unsatisfied demands for social change to result in conflicts that are agglutinated throughout the world. Academia has taken up the debate on conflicts involving the timing of social processes, which is undoubtedly an aspect that also concerns politics. This leads us to wonder about the politics of time in such everyday aspects of life as the definitions of sleeping hours, the most efficient time zones for winter or summer, or the delimitation of working and study hours for adults and young people, as well as pre- and post-natal times, projection of the population into the future or life expectancy as life years. In parallel, social times can also lead to intergenerational decoupling, for example, due to the lack of shared frameworks of meaning between age groups with increasingly changing tastes, styles and even idioms, which challenges the convergence of common horizons of meaning. Through the analysis of the debate on the latest constitution proposal in Chile, the article observes the politics of time at the legislative (legal) and deliberative (procedural) levels through the discussion on the reduction of the working time from 45 to 40 hours. The paper highlights that time, far from being an abstract category, is materialized both 1) individually (how many hours are necessary for efficient work) and 2) socially in practices and policies that constitute forms of time distribution in life stages. In turn, it is also a rationalization object through the projection of the population and its life expectancy, as well as a symbolic resource when low-income people must wait in social services, while the power and authorities time cannot be delayed.