Boredom & the Five-Day Week

As part of its celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution last year, the Soviet government announced that Russian workers would begin working a five-day week. They would still work the same 41 hours they had been working, but would compress them into five instead of six days and take two days off. The plan had one obvious advantage: it meant that Russia's work force of 110 million could have an extra day of leisure without stunting production.

Last week Pravda announced that things have not turned out quite that way.

The five-day week has become as much a curse as a blessing.

Used to pacing production to months that had only four or five days off, industry has tended to adopt a new creak-and-crash cycle under the five-day week, holding to the old pace at the first part of a month, then trying desperately to catch up to quotas toward the end. Pravda cited a Tomsk factory that now turns out some 60 fans a day during the first week of the month, then heats up to 200 or more in the last -- with a corresponding drop in quality. In the last-minute dither to meet quotas, workers may lose their extra day altogether by having to work overtime. Even then, especially in heavy industries, the extra effort may be canceled out by gummed-up delivery systems that stand idle on weekends.

Other things become immobile, too. While U.S. retail stores and services are cashing in on the new leisure by lengthening their open hours, Russia's have tended to close up with the factories. Short-stocked Muscovites, who have been used to shopping on weekends, set up such a howl when stores started closing down for two days that the city council recently ordered Sunday reopenings for some grocery stores, shoe-repair shops and department stores. The two-day weekend has also been adopted by subway stations, clinics, state banks and libraries, frustrating everyone from moviegoers to Russia's 25 million adult education students.

Even more serious, in the long run, is Russia's shortage of facilities for leisure, such as bowling alleys and coffeehouses. Pravda somewhat lamely exhorted the growing number of bored workers, who tend to get on each other's nerves when thrown together for two days, to "mobilize their own inventiveness." So far, much of the leisure has been liquid. According to an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the first effect of the new work week was a 25% jump in Moscow vodka sales.

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