Summary
Most European countries moved clocks forward one hour on Sunday, marking the start of daylight saving time (DST), a practice increasingly criticized.
Originally introduced during World War I to conserve energy, DST returned during the 1970s oil crisis and now shifts Central European Time to Central European Summer Time.
Despite a 2018 EU consultation where 84% of nearly 4 million respondents supported abolishing DST, implementation stalled due to member state disagreement.
Poland, currently holding the EU presidency, plans informal consultations to revisit the issue amid broader geopolitical priorities.
You’re telling them to “change” their own working hours in a way that would eliminate the effects of the time change. You’re telling them to set their hours as if the time change didn’t occur.
You could just stop automatically changing their hours twice a year.
The clocks are fine for 9 months out of the year. All of the problems occur in the remaining three months, and only occur because we arbitrarily change everyone’s working hours with no good reason. Stop pushing everyone to a bullshit “winter” schedule for three months, when the normal summer schedule works just fine.
It’s the summer hours that are abnormal though…
Depends what you mean by “abnormal”.
It is not “normal” for solar noon to occur ante meridiem in some places, and post meridiem in others. Yet, legacy standard time requires this: the west end of the time zone experiences solar noon at 11:30 in the morning, or even earlier in some cases.
Improved time has the entire time zone experience midday in the PM.
We use improved time for 3/4 of the year; its hard to say that the more common time system is the “abnormal” one. The legacy time system might once have been considered a “standard”, but so were 8-track tapes at one point. (But that’s the wrong metaphor here… “Standard time” went out of fashion before reel-to-reel, before electrically-driven record players. The last time “standard time” was in common use was shortly before broadcast radio was developed. State-of-the-art audio playback was replacing hand-cranked record players with spring-loaded clockwork players. Suffice it to say, “Standard” time hasn’t been “standard” in more than a hundred years. )
We have evolved a superior alternative that has become the de facto standard in everything but name.
Legacy time was developed by the robber barons in the late 19th century, to support industry. Improved time is an adjustment to that standard to favor the needs of the worker for rest and recreation. We cannot allow modern oligarchs to keep us on this outdated legacy system.
I’m really curious why you think it important that solar noon occurs at or after clock-noon. My only care is that they are close together, it doesn’t matter which is first.
Outdoor trades tend to start work around 7am, when noise ordinances are lifted, and knock off a couple hours after midday, to avoid the heat of summer. With midday at 11:30, summer sunrise was three hours before they could even start their work. All those cool morning hours, perfect for hard work, completely wasted, while workers suffer heat exhaustion in the afternoon.
Fortunately, we have only rarely used legacy time in summer in the past hundred years. We’ve built our legal and industrial infrastructure on the premise that solar noon will occur sometime between 12:30 and 13:30 local time for 8-9 months of the year.
Maintaining that historical expectation with permanent summer time will greatly reduce the transition to a “locked clock”.