It seems to me that past societies would have a very good understanding about the idea that one's time could belong to your employer as many of them were (and some had) full-time live-in servants, or season-long farm labor contracts for landless laborers, or serfdom/rent situations with a duty to work x days/season to cultivate the landlord's land instead of theirs, or indentured servitude or even slavery, or any other such relationships. Before industrial age it might be weird for the time of a free middle-class man to belong to an employer, but there weren't that many such men.
"Historically, human work patterns have taken the form of intense bursts of energy followed by rest. Farming, for instance, is generally an all-hands-on-deck mobilization around planting and harvest, with the off-seasons occupied by minor projects. Large projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast tend to take the same form. This is typical of how human beings have always worked. There is no reason to believe that acting otherwise would result in greater efficiency or productivity. Often it has precisely the opposite effect.
One reason that work was historically irregular is because it was largely unsupervised. This is true of medieval feudalism and of most labor arrangements until relatively recent times, even if the relationship between worker and boss was strikingly unequal. If those at the bottom produced what was required of them, those at the top couldn’t be bothered to know how the time was spent."
