Time to end Daylight Saving Time?

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Brian White

How much do you want to depend on companies to do what is right for their workers?  At least the government is elected partly by workers so they try not to totally overrun them.

It might suit the companies to get the workers at 10 am and that would slice the workers daylight  free time into 2 useless portions instead of 1 decent length portion. AND that might suit companies.  The "average" worker might tend to sleep until 9 am, get up and go to work.  Then they can concentrate more on being "productive" because they will not have time to tire themselves out after work.

Sure, you could do that and mandate all government office workers to come in at 8 in the morning instead of 7 on some day in the spring. Some businesses would miss, some restaurants for instance and 50 people would go for food one day and nothing ready. It would be so peacemeal that it would be chaos. By changing the clock you avoid the peacemeal approach.

Machjo wrote:

When I was in China, some companies had a revolutionary idea: their working hours would be pushed back an hour for so many months of the year. So their staff could still enjoy more sunlight without having to fiddle with the clock.

Now let's reverse the scenario. Imagine that here in Ontario which does have DST, a company decides that it would change its working hours twice a year to counterbalance DST (perfectly legal to the best of my knowledge). Clearly that would make us fiddle with clocks for nothing. So why not just leave the clocks and watches out of it and just come to work an hour later or earlier depending on the time of year? Same effect but without having to fiddle with all our clocks.

Machjo

Brian White wrote:

How much do you want to depend on companies to do what is right for their workers?  At least the government is elected partly by workers so they try not to totally overrun them.

It might suit the companies to get the workers at 10 am and that would slice the workers daylight  free time into 2 useless portions instead of 1 decent length portion. AND that might suit companies.  The "average" worker might tend to sleep until 9 am, get up and go to work.  Then they can concentrate more on being "productive" because they will not have time to tire themselves out after work.

Sure, you could do that and mandate all government office workers to come in at 8 in the morning instead of 7 on some day in the spring. Some businesses would miss, some restaurants for instance and 50 people would go for food one day and nothing ready. It would be so peacemeal that it would be chaos. By changing the clock you avoid the peacemeal approach.

Machjo wrote:

When I was in China, some companies had a revolutionary idea: their working hours would be pushed back an hour for so many months of the year. So their staff could still enjoy more sunlight without having to fiddle with the clock.

Now let's reverse the scenario. Imagine that here in Ontario which does have DST, a company decides that it would change its working hours twice a year to counterbalance DST (perfectly legal to the best of my knowledge). Clearly that would make us fiddle with clocks for nothing. So why not just leave the clocks and watches out of it and just come to work an hour later or earlier depending on the time of year? Same effect but without having to fiddle with all our clocks.

 

Seeing that I have more social-corporatist leanings myself, I natually support more democratization of the economy, and that could include giving workers more voting and administrative rights in companies perhaps through co-determination laws and the like. So instad of the government dictating to all workers in a one-size-fits-all approach, each company could decide for itself, seeing that workers would get to be consulted by the companies too.

 

As for peacemeal approaches, I must say that from my observations in China, few conmpanies changed their hours from one season to the next, though it was an observation I'd made of some companies.

 

And seeing that many of them were mom and pop shops, it's not like some big bad fat cat came and told them not to change their working hours.

Skinny Dipper

In Canada, many of our time zone boundaries are so skewed that during DST, some places are about 2 hours ahead of their actual solar time.

In Europe, there is one big European Central Time Zone that stretches from Spain to Serbia.  At equivalent latitudes, they just compensate or different sunrises and sunsets by having different business/school hours.  Also, cultural and climate differences means that Europeans use their time differently.  Note, there are at least two other time zones that cover Europe  UK/Ireland/Portugal and Finland/Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania/most of Ukraine/Romania/Moldova/Bulgaria/Greece.

Skinny Dipper

While China has one official time zone, I do believe that the locals in the western part of China still use their own unofficial time.  It's hard to wake up two hours early just to conform with the people in Beijing.

Machjo

Skinny Dipper wrote:

While China has one official time zone, I do believe that the locals in the western part of China still use their own unofficial time.  It's hard to wake up two hours early just to conform with the people in Beijing.

 

And that was confusing. At the train station, you understood it was Beijing time, but if a friend invited you for lunch, you'd have to ask which time he was referring to. usually it had to do with his ethnic affiliation, A han usually used official Beijing time, whereas a Uighur usually used unofficial local time.

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