The writer is author of ‘The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty’Across Europe there is a political clamour to find ways of increasing working time. Short hours are regarded as a prime source of the region’s economic malaise. But the focus on hours of labour is misguided. Instead of putting pressure on the unemployed to search for jobs, governments should consider how to raise the productivity of all work-related time.

For some full-time employees, the days are filled with so-called “‘empty labour”. While researching my book on time, I came across many examples. One famous case concerned a German civil servant who on his retirement sent an email to his colleagues saying that for the previous 14 years he had been there but not really there, since he had had nothing to do. Another case concerned an executive in a finance company in the City of London who wrote after he resigned that he had been paid a six-figure salary for six years for work that could have been completed in under six months.

Policymakers tend to measure employment by looking at time spent in paid labour rather than time spent working. As such they are unable to see the increasing time inequality between those who are in full-time, stable employment (the salariat) and the insecure, “precariat” workforce.