Explanation from the original post:
http://watchesbysjx.com/2020/07/time-consciousness-and-discipline-industrial-revolution.html?amp=1 is a decent article about the rise of time consciousness.
Excerpt: With wasted time being forgone potential output, factory owners developed an obsession with time. Contemporary accounts exist of factory owners who deliberately tampered with the clocks in their factories to slow them down, and thus gain more hours – and output – from their workers. Other employers hid the clocks altogether.
James Myles, writing in his 1850 autobiography, Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy, recalled his “masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night”.
