Paper short abstract:

This paper looks into the moral assumptions underlying the terminological choices surrounding timebanking in Helsinki, Finland. In particular, I focus on the idea of "exchanging" time and the way it conflicts with the tax authority's idea of time credits as "work performances".

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the moral viewpoints of two conflicting interpretations of timebanking - an "alternative" trading and exchange system - in Helsinki, Finland. The argument revolves around the Finnish state tax authority's 2013 decision to make time credits taxable income. By doing so, the tax office undermined the principles upheld by the Helsinki Timebank - crucially, "that everyone's time, work and needs are of equal worth".

The tax office has employed a taxation system based on fixed work identities, and applied this onto a trading network which, in turn, conceptualises its activity in terms of exchanges in the medium of time. The tax office's motivation is to make the timebank's time credits (called tovis, i.e. "whiles") convertible into the state's official currency of taxation, the euro. The timebank insists that monetary valuation of time credits undermines the values of communality and mutual aid: after all one does not "buy" things in the timebank, one "exchanges" them. Thus the two conflicting views over the worth of the "while" do not highlight just a discrepancy between the two ways of understanding time banking, but also wider moral ideas that accompany "exchange" in contrast to "trading", "transferring" or buying and selling.