Is Time
A Time Bank Network for Islington…

There is a new report out called The Shape of Jobs to Come.  It has been produced by an organisation called Fast Future in a project funded by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.  Twenty ‘top’ future jobs are described and there as future job number 18 is ‘Time Broker / Trader’. “Wow, that’s amazing”, I thought and downloaded the full report, expecting a really interesting read.  It was interesting - but not for the reasons I expected.

They’ve taken Edgar’s idea of using time as a currency but developed it into the opposite of what we believe.  They imagine a future where people decide to become Brokers to make a profit - in time credits - by charging people for arranging exchanges.  I say ‘exchanges’ but this is only about buying and selling time for profit. They miss that society does this already - it is called having a paid job.   They also imagine Time Traders acting like Stock Brokers but making money out of buying and selling other people’s time.  That sounds familiar; it sounds like a Slave Trader… Weird. 

Instead of using time as an alternative to money with all the wonderful effects that has, they manage to make it almost exactly he same as the paper stuff.   Not a lot imagination or innovation there. 

They model time banking like a business and time bank Brokers like a bunch of Merchant Bankers. Their idea of a Broker would never dream of trying to bring people together to create new social networks and make strangers into friends - because then they couldn’t make a profit! 

In the time banking world, an hour of ironing is of equal value to an hour running Fast Future – or even the country.  In their world Brokers decide what somebody’s skills are worth and it is clear they think some people’s time is worth more than that of the rest of us. We redefine work to include what is usually unpaid but is essential for society to function. We treat everyone as having the ability to make their communities better. I doubt they could think like us without changing the way the think the world ‘is’ or should be.

It is a funny thing to do.  Nobody - except the very greedy – would bother to write about what a Social Enterprise would be like if it were a private business and profits went to shareholders intead of being invested in the community or shared among the workers.  Nobody writes about how much nicer it would be if a Volunteer Manager dealt with employees instead of volunteers. So, why try and adapt timebankng to fit the market? I don’t know.  Maybe they haven’t put a lot of thought into it.  Maybe they think we’re the weird ones!

Quite frankly I think  they outline a vision of time banking that could have been redesigned by a bunch of extreme right-wing economists that want EVERYTHING priced and controlled by the market.  Instead of community, co-operation, co-production and reciprocity we get something just about personal profit and greed. Maybe it is simply that they think that’s the way all people behave to each other. My old Economics professor was like that and we eventually agreed to disagee. That view of ‘human nature’ doesn’t involve a lot of imagination, innovation - or understanding – either…