By silicon.com, 10 February 2003 17:08
COMMENT If you have ever worked in a warehouse or some kind of factory you probably know there is a culture of eating lunch in a separate room or leaving the premises altogether, as well as taking at least a couple of tea breaks each day. But this kind of blue collar 'downtime' is lacking from most white collar work these days - especially in the UK, it would seem. A campaign, calling for (at the very least) a virtual 60 minute lunch break for everyone in the UK, has been launched under the name and website www.gone2lunch.com. The aim is to give staff their own statutory personal time back for surfing the web without risk of recrimination - or, indeed, time away from the office. Employers are set to benefit from happier, more productive workers, the campaign coordinators claim. silicon.com is glad to support this campaign. Plenty of less enlightened company bosses may not be happy with workers spending under eight hours chained to their desks everyday but the message is clear - get over it. They should of course be encouraging flexible working, treating employees like grown ups and realising happy staff are more likely to perform well. Only last week we ran a story about how surf-happy staff are likely to do more work than their colleagues who don't spend time online for their own purporses as they tend to put in extra time working at home. The 'slacker' tag is a misnomer. But it is also understandable that 'better safe than sorry' is a mindset that will lead those same bosses to come up with proper web usage policies, assuming most non-work lunches won't actually be spent away from work - that would surely be revolutionary! This means more work for IT departments, unfortunately, but is only civilised. Whether a 60 minute lunch in the park or 60 minutes on Hotmail, sandwich in hand, is even possible in these days of wafer thin staffing levels and lay-offs of often essential workers is a tougher question. Is there a turn-around-the-economy.com website we can turn to?
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