Sitting Time Is Not Capital

I. The Claim from the Waiting Room

Anyone who has taken part in a shared venture knows this figure. He is at every meeting, sits through every discussion, reads every email and answers some. He has been in the project for years. Only he has contributed nothing: no idea, no drawing, no customer, no line. And when the project succeeds, he lodges his claim: I was there from the start.

You meet him everywhere. In the research group that publishes a paper. In the band whose song suddenly plays on the radio. In the start-up that finds a buyer. In the club that receives a bequest. The question behind his claim is old and not stupid: does time have value in itself? Surely whoever has put in a lot of time is owed something?

II. What Marx Really Said

Those who argue this way like to invoke the labour theory of value: the value of a thing is measured by the labour time it contains. The idea goes back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and became the foundation of Karl Marx’s economics. Yet Marx, of all people, explicitly excludes the time-sitter.

In the very first chapter of “Capital” he anticipates the objection: it might seem that “the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production”. No, says Marx. Value is created only by “socially necessary” labour time, the time needed under normal conditions with average skill and intensity.

His example is harsh. When the power loom came to England, a piece of cloth required only about half as much labour. The hand-loom weaver at his old loom took as long as ever. But his hour was now worth only half an hour. He had not worked less. He had only contributed less. If even the chief witness for time as the measure of value says that time without result creates nothing, the time-sitter has no theorist left on his side.

The opposing school is stricter still. Carl Menger and the Austrians said that value does not arise with the producer at all, but with the user. A well dug for ten years that gives no water is worth nothing. Whichever school one follows, the result is the same: time alone carries no value.

III. Sacrifice Is Not Contribution

And yet the time-sitter has given something. His time is missing elsewhere. He could have worked, learned, been with his family. That is a sacrifice, and it is real.

But a sacrifice is not yet a contribution. Someone who has sat for twenty years in a doctor’s waiting room has sacrificed a lot of time. That does not make him co-owner of the practice. The error lies in a silent leap: from what it cost me to what I am owed. Costs do not establish a claim. Otherwise the hiker who got lost would be the most accomplished mountaineer.

In 1689 John Locke grounded property in a person “mixing” his labour with nature: whoever ploughs the field owns the harvest. Locke too demands something that mixes. Whoever sits beside the field watching the ploughing has mixed nothing.

IV. What Counts Nonetheless

Fairness demands a qualification, because not all time without visible result is lost.

By his own estimate Thomas Edison tested at least 6,000 plant fibres as filaments before settling on carbonised bamboo from near Kyoto, which burned for more than 1,200 hours. Most of his attempts failed. Yet each was a contribution, because each failure struck a path off the list. The difference from sitting: Edison tried something. The failure was a result.

Readiness can have value too. The fire brigade is worth its money even when nothing is burning. But its readiness is agreed beforehand as a task, not claimed afterwards. And finally there is work that stays invisible: whoever keeps the schedule, settles the dispute, takes the minutes, makes the coffee while others shine. That is a contribution, and it is often underrated, especially when women do it.

How to tell this from sitting? There is a simple test: would something have been missing if he had been missing? Without Edison’s attempts, no filament. Without the minute-taker, no memory of the project. Without the time-sitter: the same result, one chair fewer.

V. How Others Settled It Long Ago

Wherever claims are at stake, many fields have long since decided this question.

In medicine, the international rules of the journals determine who may appear as an author: only those who contributed substantially to design or analysis, helped write the text, approved the final version and take responsibility for the work. Explicitly not enough: having raised funds or generally led the group. These rules are aimed at “honorary authorship”, the bad habit of the boss appearing on every paper he did not work on.

In patent law, a co-inventor is only someone who made a creative contribution to the invention. Purely auxiliary work is not enough, nor is constructive assistance that did not shape the result. Whoever carries out experiments according to instructions has worked, but not invented.

In music, a song is credited to those who wrote it, not to everyone who sat in the room at every rehearsal.

Closest to time-based thinking, of all places, are start-ups. There shares are “earned” over years, typically four, and whoever leaves in the first year gets nothing. That protects against early quitters. But it is itself a time rule. It rewards persistence, not performance. Even there someone can sit out four years and collect his share if nobody specified in advance what he was supposed to deliver.

VI. Why Time Survives as a Measure

If time says so little about contribution, why is it so persistent? Because it can be measured. A contribution is hard to assess, an hour is not. The time clock counts presence, not results, and where nothing better is available, people take what can be counted.

In 1955 Cyril Northcote Parkinson wrote the sentence in “The Economist” that has since been known as Parkinson’s Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Whoever is rewarded by time has no reason to be quick. And in 2018 David Graeber described in “Bullshit Jobs” how entire professions live off presence being mistaken for work.

Put bluntly: the time-sitter lives off a measurement problem. And those who really contribute are often to blame. They do not record what they did, and they do not agree at the outset who should deliver what. They rely on everyone knowing who did the work. In the end nobody knows any more, and only the time can still be proven.

VII. A Rule for Shared Projects

This leads not to contempt for time, but to a simple order.

At the start, agree who contributes what. Not how many hours, but which task and which result. The idea, the design, the financing, the sales, the minutes.

Shares follow tasks, not presence. Whoever takes on a task and fulfils it earns his share. Whoever does not fulfil it does not earn it, however long he was there.

There are fixed points for review. Has everyone delivered what was agreed? Does the distribution need adjusting? Someone who has delivered nothing for a year should not find out only when profits are shared.

This also applies to our own proposal in “Two Keys” that everyone who works in a firm should share in its profits. A critic will say this rewards precisely the time-sitter. The answer: those who take on a task share in the profits, not those who are present. Mondragón pays by function and responsibility, not by years of service. Shared ownership only works if it is clear what everyone brings. Otherwise it becomes a waiting room with profit-sharing.

VIII. The Only Thing Everyone Has Equally

Time is the fairest good in the world. Every person has exactly twenty-four hours a day, the inventor and the onlooker, the diligent and the idle. That is precisely why it cannot be a measure of a share. What everyone has equally distinguishes no one.

What distinguishes a person in a shared work is what he makes of his time. The hand-loom weaver did not work less than the factory weaver. But Marx was right: what counted was the cloth.

Time has costs, but no value. Whoever wants a share must put in something that would be missing if he were missing.