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.
Crucially, the problem here isn’t a lack of free time: research suggests we generally have more leisure than in the past. The issue is that we can’t coordinate it, so as to spend it fulfillingly with others – thanks partly to the decline of conventions and institutions that used to organise time on our behalf, including the traditional nine-to-five job. Ironically, this is true even for people who do have control over their schedules, like me. Nobody dictates my hours, nor those of many in my social circle. Yet that hardly spares us those months-long email chains trying to arrange a meetup. My patchwork calendar of work deadlines and toddler play dates is no more likely to mesh with my friends’ availability than if our diaries were being determined by our bosses.
And we should care about this, writes Shulevitz, not solely for quality of life reasons, but for political ones, too: “It’s a cliche among political philosophers that, if you want to create the conditions for tyranny, you sever the bonds of intimate relationship and local community.” To put it simplistically: a society can’t flourish if its citizens can’t make a plan to meet for a beer.
The real solutions to this situation will be political, too. But in the meantime, those of us with some control of our time could make this tiny resolution: not to cry off social plans for lame reasons. If I’ve agreed to meet you, I’ll try to resist the weaselly urge to stay home instead. Which maybe isn’t such a tiny thing at all; when the whole momentum of society goes towards making it harder to coordinate with others, doing so anyway is a subversive act. Even better, it’s a subversive act where I get to drink beer.
Read this
In her book The Sabbath World, Judith Shulevitz makes the case that rest requires more than just not working: we need social customs, ancient or adapted, to help us slow down.
