The document discusses the decline of the traditional '9-5' work schedule and the rise of continuous working patterns, drawing parallels with the Soviet Union's experiment with a constant working week. Asynchronous work is becoming more common, allowing flexibility but also leading to longer hours and diminished work-life balance. This transformation creates disparities between those who can adapt their work around personal life and those constrained by rigid schedules, particularly affecting shift workers.

1. We are creeping towards a continuous working week
The decline of the ‘9-5’ has been under way for decades — but
now it’s creating workplace winners and losers
Wall Street Journal
September 14 2021
In 1929, the Soviet Union replaced the seven day week with the
nepreryvka or “continuous working week”. Workers were split
into five groups on five-day cycles with staggered rest days so
that production never stopped. It became common for people to
colour-code their friends in their address books according to
which day they had off.
It wasn’t popular. “What is there for us to do at home, if our wives
are in the factory, our children are at school and nobody can visit
us?” one worker complained in a letter to a newspaper. As Oliver
Burkeman, who writes about the nepreryvka in his new book
Four Thousand Weeks, observes: “The value of time comes not
from the sheer quantity you have, but from whether you’re in
sync with the people you care about most.”

2. The Soviet Union abandoned its vast experiment after 11 years.
But today’s economy is moving back towards a sort of
“continuous working week”. Society’s shared rhythms of daytime
work and weekend rest are disintegrating before our eyes.
The decline of the “9 to 5” has been under way for decades. In
2010-11, 20 per cent of employees in the US worked more than
half their hours outside the standard hours of 6am to 6pm or on
weekends. A vast survey of workers across the EU in 2015 found
about half worked at least one Saturday a month, almost a third
worked at least one Sunday, and roughly a fifth worked at night.
As in the Soviet Union, one driver of these working patterns has
been the desire of manufacturers to run plants 24/7 to maximise
the use of machines and minimise the cost of interrupted
production. One common shift pattern for production and
warehouse workers today is to work four 12-hour days, have four
days off, then work four nights, then have another four days off.
Another is to work eight-hour shifts on rotation. As one current
UK job advert for a warehouse job explains: “The hours of work
are: 6am to 2pm, 2pm to 10pm, 10pm to 6am. You will work one
week on one shift and then rotate, therefore flexibility to cover all
shifts is required.”
The return to the office

3. We want to hear from readers about plans for returning to their
workplace. Are you under pressure to go back or are you looking
forward to seeing colleagues? Tell us about your plans via this
survey.
Factories and warehouses aren’t the only workplaces that run
around the clock. Shift work is common for doctors, nurses,
carers, drivers and security guards, among others. It appears to
be on the rise. In 2015, 21 per cent of workers in the EU reported
doing shift work, up from 17 per cent a decade earlier.
While shift work suits some people, the evidence suggests it
damages their health, especially if they rotate between days and
nights. Twelve-hour shifts, rotating shifts and unpredictable
schedules are associated with higher risk of mental illness,
cardiovascular problems and gastrointestinal problems.
Shift work can also harm family life. “Divorce is pretty bad. We
see a lot of divorce, just due to the fact that families, especially
young couples, you’re away from your family [for] 12 hours, and
then when you go home after a 12-hour shift, you just want to
sleep,” one manager in a US manufacturing plant told academics
studying the impact of shift work. A worker in the same study
said: “It changes our time with our family. It changes our time

4. with our social life and church and community groups. All those
things that you would like to be involved with.”
The old work rhythms are breaking down in office life too, but in
this case it’s driven more by employees. The spatial freedom to
work outside the office, supercharged by the pandemic, has
increased the temporal freedom to work at any time.
“Asynchronous work” is the new buzzword in HR and
management circles. This has advantages: it avoids the
unpleasant synchrony of everyone cramming on to trains every
morning and evening, and allows people to fit work around other
priorities or responsibilities.
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There are downsides too. A study published in 2017 of workers
in 15 countries found that the impact of remote work on work-life
balance was “highly ambiguous”: workers reported more time
with their families, but also an increase in working hours and
blurred boundaries between paid work and personal life.

5. Regulators are already thinking about how to protect white-collar
workers. France and Mexico, for example, have promised a
“right to disconnect” from emails and phones. But policymakers
should pay more attention to shift workers, too, whose employer-
dictated hours can be out of sync with their body clocks and
family lives.
The disintegration of the old working week creates winners and
losers. One of the stark divides in the post-pandemic world will
be between those who can fit work around life, and those who
must fit life around work.