not again

I appear to have had to work this weekend.

I'm not particularly chuffed with this, as you can imagine.  I've never had a problem putting in the hours fundamentally, but the problem is we don't work any sort of flexi at work, so whenever I do long days or work the weekend I'm basically just pissing away my free time.

There was actually an article on the beeb website this week about Gambia - the African country that's basically given all of its civil servants 4 day weeks.  As I understand it that's the compressed week version, rather than cutting a fifth off of their week and a fifth of their wage.

So in other words they work the same number of hours, but they just work them across four days, rather than five.  There is actually quite a lot of evidence that this works, if you'll excuse the pun.  By which I mean that people are just as productive if they work their hours in four days, rather than five.

It obviously sparked a bit of a debate on whether it could work here.  The answer is obviously "yes", but of course it will never happen.  And in some ways it is difficult to see how it would work in all sectors.  Part of the article had a quote from a guy whose company works like that (in Australia, I think) and he said part of it was to give his workforce the time to do chores on a day where others are working.

So the example would be getting your hair cut or doing bank stuff or something like that.  So obviously if the whole country worked some sort 4 day week then that would potentially evaporate - if all banks were closed for a 3 day weekend, you wouldn't gain any advantage.  And of course if the hair dressers compressed their hours then would they close Saturday and Sunday?  So then Friday would be the day everyone treated like Saturday now so the hairdresser would be as busy, so there'd be no advantage.

The answer of course is a flexible approach.  So for jobs where it sort of doesn't matter, like civil servants, you can do fairly simple 4 day week.  Other jobs you could have overlaps - so some have Monday, others have Friday.  Other people get more flexible arrangements.  And some (teachers, for example) it's perhaps not possible at all, though there are other perks (long summer holidays, etc.).

Anyway, I seem to have gone off track - my company doesn't work flexi and it's basically because the boss has a very Victorian attitude to work.  If you're not at your desk then you're not working.  Well, I say that - it's weird, because some people seem to have ended up with flexibility in their working patterns, but I guess that's been through individual negotiation and been particularly hard fought for - it's not company policy.

Weirdly there have been some newer employees where you can kinda see why she'd want that.  Now I wouldn't call them slackers, as such, but they certainly do a lot of chatting and "not quite" working.

Trouble is, someone like me who is properly dedicated when there are things that need to be done then simply ends up feeling like we're being screwed over, because I don't ever got those hours back, or, and this is probably why it's so annoying, feel like it's being properly appreciated.

It seems like a weirdly English thing to me - the bosses are always trying to screw as much out of you as they can.  You can kinda see why Marx formed his theories while living in Britain.