Does anyone really know what time it is?

The time change landscape is getting messy. What does it mean for the workforce?

WE ARE IN a slow-simmering time war. When the clocks fall back in a couple of weeks, some of Ontario will make the change, while part of it (the slice of Northwestern Ontario on central time) will stick with daylight saving time, joining what one minister called “Wab Kinew time,” following the lead of some prairie and west-coast provinces unwilling to tolerate the early sunsets, late sunrises be damned.

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They’re not alone, either — around the world, more jurisdictions are bailing on the twice-annual time shift. Rarely has “what time is it?” been so hotly debated. (I’m personally Team Standard Time, if we’re declaring our biases here.)

But as the Financial Times’ Sarah O’Connor wrote recently, these fights go back more than a century, proving there is nothing new under the sun, no matter where it is in the sky and what time the clock says it is.

In the 1920s, sociologists studying Muncie, Indiana, found the town divided not just by class but also by the clock. Working-class households had the lights on by 6 a.m., while the ‘business class’ slept in. It came to a head in 1925, when the town debated whether to adopt daylight saving time. “The working-class early risers argued they would lose sleep, while the businessmen urged the change ‘because of golf,’” she writes.

A century on, the golfers still mostly win — places that ditch the time change mostly ignore the sleep experts and keep daylight time.

But there are bigger time crimes being committed, O’Connor suggested — namely, against night shift workers and the working class more broadly, who are more affected when clock changes start messing with circadian rhythms.

“It is a myth that night-shift workers can become nocturnal over time,” she said, noting that research has found that roughly 97 per cent of night workers never actually adjust. “The correlations with cancer are so clear that night work has been classed as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

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Night owls with day jobs don’t get off easy either — a Finnish study published last month found evening types were 1.7 times more likely to end up on a disability pension within 12 years, even after adjusting for education and type of job. The researchers’ best guess is that “traditional working times interfere significantly with the sleeping preferences of late chronotypes, leading to social jet lag.”

Part of why the time debate gets so tense is that it has clear winners and losers, and the line between them tracks class lines closely. Most American night shift workers have no more than a high-school education, research shows, and the pandemic’s flexibility boom mostly went to white-collar workers who already had some. (In Canada, about 12 per cent of workers are on nights or rotating shifts, according to CAREX Canada, which calculated that figure back in 2011.)

If you’re looking for a sign of the times we’re in, then, look to U.S. President Trump, who wants to make daylight saving time permanent. No surprise here — he’s a prodigious golfer, and he said it would help anyone who’d “like to play golf a little bit without having to run home after 14 holes.” Kieran Delamont