Abstract
This paper argues that even though the average work time is on the decrease since the Second World War in the developed countries, the visions of its substantial decrease caused by automatization were not fulfilled. On the contrary, our society is frequently labeled "exhausted society" or "burnout society".
There is a substantial increase in the number of stress-related mental health issues among the working population that cannot stand the temporal pressures of our accelerating society. Analyzing this situation, we first identify some shifts defining our "postmodern condition": from the "disciplinary society" to "achievement society" and from "subjects of obedience" to "subjects of productivity".
As the symptoms of these shifts, we identify "psychologization of work" and "privatization of stress" which means that subjects blame themselves for their shortcomings even when the causes of their hardships are systemic. Therefore, individuals learn to face the time pressures by individualistic methods like mindfulness, not by collective ones.
This paper, however, tries to present the collective methods, especially the legal ones, stemming from the highly abstract concept of "right to time".