In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign…
In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for understanding Covid, and politics in general. /1 https://t.co/fuMt4ioEcD
Because less than 40 years later, employers took the weekend back. Some businesses never stopped working on a Saturday morning, but in the late-1980s all of Saturday was lost. Then only a handful of years later, Sunday trading was back too. /2
https://t.co/lJ7dxvpfDB
Now weekend days are almost indistinguishable from weekdays. Traffic is even worse. This is the Covid link, the process of normalisation. Many workers want weekend trading, because they don’t have time during the rest of the work week to shop. /3
Just as they want schools to open until 6pm, for childcare in their busy work lives. Embracing their own servitude to the economy as ‘freedom and flexibility’. Why isn’t there more anger at this stolen weekend, which took more than a century of fight to give to workers? /4
The same reason people ‘live with’ Covid. Normalisation. Humans are social creatures above all else. If everybody else is doing it, it’s normal. Political campaigners understand and are passionate about things like 8-hour days and 4/5-day weeks. Most other people? /5
Will do what most other people are doing. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if many workers, if asked today, wouldn’t even be aware that shops were closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, only 40 years ago. All change is led, and by about 5% of the group, of any size. /6
The other 95% will follow the 5%, and mostly by emulating their friend and family networks. Violating those networks is worse than death to them. People can be seriously sick, even dying, around them, but of nobody else is taking precautions, that’s game over. /7
Normalisation is the process of embedding some decision, socially. Making it sticky, something nobody will challenge for fear of standing out from the crowd. All politics is really social. Everything is.
Have a good weekend. I hope you don’t have to work. /end