Introduction
Time-use patterns provide a crucial lens to assess how workers divide their time between paid work, unpaid responsibilities, education, and leisure. It can tell us something beyond wages, and help us understand the worker not merely as the seller of labour. It can give cues to situate the worker beyond an entity of the labour market, existing across different systems, and establish a flow among these systems (Bhattacharya, 2017).We look at latest nationally representative Time Use Data (2024) released by Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation (MoSPI) to compare time use of workers doing casual labour, regular salaried, self employed work, those unemployed and those out of the labour force¹. The attempt is to place it in context of the existing literature around the gendered burden of paid and unpaid work to see if this analysis can provide intersectional insights on the nature of the burden.
Social reproduction can be understood as “the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (Brenner and Laslett, 1991). The focus is to point out, from time use trends, underlying working conditions which could be interacting with gendered differences in time use, revealing divergences in social reproduction. We also try to tie certain trends of worker’s time spent in learning and unpaid work with existing labour market phenomena to see if they reveal a fuller picture about the intersections of gender and type of work. Additionally, time-use data can tell us about differences in the quality of life. We compare leisure time across workers to provide an intersectional picture of that.
