The right to request for flexible working legislation (sections 80F-80I, Employment Rights Act 1996) attempts to reconcile the demands of employees’ jobs with those in their personal lives. It does this by detailing a procedure whereby employees can request an adjustment to the amount of time spent working and the timing of those hours. The duration of work time and the timing of work time are indeed critical factors in employees’ ability to manage their work and personal lives. But it is questionable whether these purely quantitative features of work time capture the temporal issues that feed into the work-personal life problem. This article reviews the temporal assumptions implicit in the flexible working legislation and critically evaluates them in light of broader theoretical perspectives on time. In particular, it highlights the role of temporal subjectivities, which employees develop at work, and the relationship of these to new emerging patterns of work. A case study focusing on software engineers and managers is presented to demonstrate these theoretical viewpoints in practice. The article concludes that the legislation’s failure to address the social and collective nature of time is problematic, and that this hinders real progress in achieving flexible working.

中文翻译：

---

工作场所临时性：对灵活工作条款的基于时间的批判

要求灵活工作立法的权利（第 80F-80I 条，《1996 年就业权利法》）试图调和员工的工作需求与个人生活需求。它通过详细说明一个程序来实现这一点，员工可以通过该程序请求调整工作时间和工作时间。工作时间的长短和工作时间的时间安排确实是员工管理工作和个人生活能力的关键因素。但是，这些工作时间的纯定量特征是否反映了进入工作-个人生活问题的时间问题，这是值得怀疑的。本文回顾了灵活工作立法中隐含的时间假设，并根据更广泛的时间理论视角对其进行了批判性评估。特别是，它强调了员工在工作中发展的时间主观性的作用，以及这些与新出现的工作模式的关系。以软件工程师和管理人员为重点的案例研究将在实践中展示这些理论观点。文章的结论是，立法未能解决时间的社会和集体性质是有问题的，这阻碍了实现灵活工作的真正进展。