The phenomenon in which one adapts their temporal rhythms to those of something or someone else, is called entrainment, and it often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability.

Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose?

On labour

It’s a short step from seeing people as the embodiment of work and labour to turning the units of time they spent working into money.

It is nothing short of the reduction of man into machine.

Before inventors created engines to take the place of men, the leaders of men had drilled and regimented multitudes of human beings: they had discovered how to reduce men to machines. The slaves and peasants who hauled the stones for the pyramids, pulling in rhythm to the crack of the whip, the slaves working in the Roman galley, each man chained to his seat and unable to perform any other motion than the limited mechanical one — these were all machine phenomena.

See also: Saving Time