A society can’t flourish if its citizens can’t make a plan to meet for a beer
Ninety years ago this year, Joseph Stalin unveiled an ingenious new scheme to transform the Soviet Union into an industrial powerhouse: the end of the seven-day week. Much of the workforce switched to a four-day week, plus one day off – but they were divided into five cohorts, each resting on a different day, so factories could run without stopping. The propaganda, according to the historian Clive Foss, was that “workers would get more rest; production and employment would increase [and] leisure time would be more rationally employed, for cultural activities (theatre, clubs, sports) would no longer have to be crammed into a weekend, but could flourish every day, with their facilities far less crowded.”
It proved massively unpopular, though, not least because it made communal life impossible: families and friends with different rest days couldn’t coordinate social time together. (“That’s no holiday, if you have to celebrate by yourself,” one worker complained.) Stalin didn’t mind – undermining the centrality of the family was part of his plan, after all – but the new week didn’t boost production as planned, either, so it was phased out. Yet, as the writer Judith Shulevitz pointed out in the Atlantic recently, the social chaos of unsynchronised schedules has returned. It’s just that these days it’s imposed not by the state, but by unpredictable work patterns. Employees subject to “on-demand scheduling” and zero-hour contracts get the worst of it. Meanwhile, plenty of fancier jobs require staying late at short notice, or scrapping a weekend plan to plough through emails.
Continue reading...
0 comments :
Post a Comment