Time for no one

Recently I was reading about a couple of surveys that reported the ever-changing pace of modern life and thought, who does it benefit? 

Apparently the average lunch “hour” is now, ironically, just 27 minutes. Which is a drop from two years ago of a further 9 minutes from the lunch “hour” then of 36 minutes. In addition to this 40% of working people choose what to have for lunch on the basis of how quickly they can eat it!

Everyone is entitled to a lunch hour – make sure you take yours. Most of our members are not paid for their lunch hours either, so switch off the mobile or pager and get a proper rest.

In another article, I read that folks that commute by road are now taking up to two hours more to get to work than 5 years ago. In fact most of these people with extra travelling took, the article admits, only an additional 20 minutes. But even this when read together with the “lunch hour” article means that a great many people have now lost or given up at least half hour of their time every working day, for nothing!

When you look at how we work today as against how we worked in the past, you have to say “What are we up to as a society”. We have footballers, film actors and TV celebrities paid more than doctors, surgeons, schoolteachers and, in the news at the moment, fire fighters!    

So lets get this right, we value sports, TV, and film personalities more than we do people that keep us safe, healthy and teach and care for our children. Workers, that’s you and me, spend longer at, or travelling to, work for less reward in real terms than we did. Whilst top executives and non-entities, (that’s those type I mentioned above) get paid more in one week than the real workers do in a year. Meanwhile in London, house prices are such that we cannot afford to buy a decent place to live. 

Now I’m not trying to write a well-researched in depth study on one subject but just highlight a few things that trouble me about our society.  What can we do about it? Stop talking about, or caring who in the media sleeps with who. Stop paying ridiculous prices to see a sports event, either in the flesh or on some digital channel. Stop breaking our necks, sometime literally if we take unsafe shortcuts, to do a job faster, and demand that the union claims large pay and London Weighting increases and, if asked to vote for a smaller offer, vote no. 

If we act together we can reverse this crazy world we seem to have blundered into.