Central Time Clock
An image of the exterior door of “Central Time Clock,” a labor-time tracking device provider that boasts “helping effectively manage employees and control labor costs.”
Access description (ALT)
A photo shows slightly worn black letters on white stickers, adhered to an industrial metal door: CENTRAL TIME CLOCK. Behind it, an inventory of Electronic and Mechanical Time Clocks, Biometric HandPunches, and other systems promises to “effectively manage employees and control labor costs.” This is a contemporary archive of how time became a unit of extraction. Beginning with the mechanical watch, time was abstracted from natural rhythms and reoriented to discipline bodies—making labor measurable, predictable, and exchangeable. The punch clock institutionalized this shift: one punched in, one punched out—marking the boundaries of compensated life. In Total Running Time, this infrastructure of control becomes a site of inquiry.