Once you and your partner are both on shifts, any semblance of a weekend is gone. I worked 3-on 2-off for a long time, it was fantastic. Then once I got a live-in partner, on a regular 9-5, I was unavailable for 40% of her weekends. That was a stretch.
Add in kids, and it'll get even messier. If mom's day off is Tuesday, dad's day off is Thursday, and the kids have the weekend off?
It works for the factory, but the more of the same family you put on opposing shifts, the messier it gets.
The same amount of product is getting sold for the same amount of wages, it's just the wages are smeared across more hours.
They've since given up, so I guess it's really "Germany, in the past".
Can a store in Germany choose to close on Saturday and open on Sunday?
It's pretty hard to convince regular people how they should change their ancient ways to make investors an extra buck.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbzg/__9.html says "no work on Sundays or public holidays from 0:00 to 24:00", plus a few exceptions where the 24 hours window can be shifted by up to 6 hours (but has to remain 24 hours long).
This implies a legal work week from Monday to Saturday within which employment contracts can schedule their working hours (following more rules, eg. not more than 10 hours at a time, mandatory breaks of a certain length within those 10 hours, and at least 11 hours of rest between two days of work).
7-8 hours a day Monday to Friday is currently normal, but deviations are possible within the legal limit.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbzg/__10.html enumerates the exceptions to the "no work on Sunday/holidays" rule. If your business doesn't fit into these exceptions (as is common for regular stores), you're not allowed to open on Sundays.
Some digging got me https://www.verkaufsoffener-sonntag.com/ladenoeffnungszeiten..., which tells a history of shopping time in Germany (although I don't know how accurate). There are minor differences on the wiki page about the same topic (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laden%C3%B6ffnungszeit#Geschic...)
According to that page the first laws of that kind in Germany were established in 1900 and were amended by exemptions for grocery stores - and jewish shops (to open on sunday instead of saturday).
Merchants (presumably including the jewish ones? that article doesn't tell) worked out a new scheme in 1911-1919 that introduced common closing times and the "calm sunday" to coordinate opening hours. While there were other changes in the meantime (mostly around closing hours), the Sunday provision stuck since then.
(Also note that there are separate laws for working hours and shop opening hours. The citations up-thread were about working hours, while this post refers to shop opening hours)
There was a constitutional court decision ~10 years ago as the state of Berlin (shop opening hours are a state matter) decided to relax the rules. "10 Sundays across the year, and all Sundays in December" (in the lead-time to Christmas) were supposed to be shopping days. The churches sued, and while religious aspects came up as well, the main thrust was about the social state principle (ie. "One full month with no mandated rest leads to exploitation"), and so the rules where tightened somewhat.
I guess a state could enact per-shop rules (ie that a shop could decide to open up to 6 days a week as to their choosing, and to avoid exploiting the regulation, the schedule must be held up for at least a year).
As Berlin seems to be the hub of Jewish life in Germany, that looks like a good place to lobby for that, but that would also require some changes to §9 / §10 ArbzG as linked upthread as an open shop on sunday without people working there is rather useless.
Shops used to close at 6:30pm, which made it difficult to do shopping after work. So being able to go shopping on Saturday was important.
One of the more important places to remember this today are public parking lots with usage limits on work days: those apply on Saturdays just like on Mo-Fr.
If you can convince someone to hire you, the government isn't going to come in and say "actually, we need more factory workers. So you don't work there any more. You instead are working here."
I'd also like to point out that there are numerous places in the US where people are perfectly capable of living on minimum wage, working 40 hours a week.
Most homeless people are homeless not because it is impossible for someone to live off of these wages, in the right areas. They are instead homeless because they have some sort of mental or physical disability that makes them incapable of work.
The idea though, that able bodied adults are unable to provide for themselves, is ridiculous. There are numerous living conditions and places where it is cheap enough to live off of.
No you don't , it's entirely dependent on your birth and the luck of the draw in what class you were born into, your opportunities etc.
> If you can convince someone to hire you, the government isn't going to come in and say "actually, we need more factory workers. So you don't work there any more. You instead are working here."
There was no forced allotment of work in the soviet union, that's a nonsense claim coming from McCarthyist myths
> I'd also like to point out that there are numerous places in the US where people are perfectly capable of living on minimum wage, working 40 hours a week.
Not without exorbitant debt or unfavourable conditions compared to those who work above the minimum wage. A society that does not require you to work, and allows a livable wage for all work is a preferable one.
> Most homeless people are homeless not because it is impossible for someone to live off of these wages, in the right areas. They are instead homeless because they have some sort of mental or physical disability that makes them incapable of work.
That's not true at all, here in Ireland for example, mostly it's because of real estate speculation and treating houses as investments rather than places were people live. Mental and physical disability should not mean you live out on the streets
> The idea though, that able bodied adults are unable to provide for themselves, is ridiculous. There are numerous living conditions and places where it is cheap enough to live off of.
I've never seen a country where most of the homeless were unemployable, and in many cases the homeless have jobs, at least here. It is absurd to argue that people should move into the rural equivalent of a ghetto , devoid of job opportunities or development, or live cold.
Not everyone should live in the Bay area, or New York, or even downtown in some major city!
There are lots and lots of places that are even within commuting distance of a major city (that isnt SF or New York...), That are inexpensive.
The world is bigger than a couple coastal cities, and there are lots of opportunities if you are willing to expand your horizons beyond 1% of the land.
> here in Ireland for example, mostly it's because of real estate speculation and treating houses as investments rather than places were people live
Then maybe people shouldn't live in this very small percentage of the world, or expand your horizons beyond demanding that you be able to live in the most expensive parts of it?
There's this FTFA
For ordinary workers, quitting one’s job, missing a day’s work or being over 20 minutes late became criminal offenses, with mandatory prison sentences.
and then there are tens of millions of people murdered, starved, and sent to gulags by the communists.
Communism has an absolute lock on the title of the greatest moral failure in human history.
And then compare it to the atrocities that established western capitalism. Fairly, I recommend.
Like in hospitality, hotels are not going to stop cleaning rooms on weekends. You are not going to close restaurants on weekends. So quite some people in services also have random days in week off.
But many do not do this, as well. It all depends on what the production target of the factory is and how much throughput the supply chain has. I think those factors tend to determine this much more than worker satisfaction.
In my personal experience, I worked at a factory that would typically run two shifts, so 16-20 hours a day in production (variable), and the third shift overnight for maintenance/cleanup, 7 days a week. But if the prices were high enough for the product at the time and the supply was in place, it would run as close to 24/7 in production as possible.