As I, and no doubt many others, struggled to adapt to the spring forward daylight time adjustment, something I recently read online came to mind.
To paraphrase, only the government could possibly think that cutting a foot off of one end of a blanket and sewing that section on the other end makes a longer blanket.
I used to accept daylight time without question.
After all, I had been told since I was in grade school in Calgary that falling back and springing forward was all to cater to farmers, who needed the "extra" daylight to tend to their crops.
But it doesn't take long to research the issue and come up with scores of articles pointing out that farmers in the U.S. and Canada had actually lobbied against the introduction of daylight time almost a century ago.
"When daylight saving was first implemented in 1918, farmers were extremely opposed to having to turn back and forward their clocks because it disrupted their schedules and made it more difficult to get the most out of hired help," reads an article on AJC.com called "Why farmers and criminals hate Daylight Saving Time".
But farmers and their workers aren't the only ones whose schedules get disrupted by jumping clocks forward and backward.
Every person out there feels the impact ó our circadian rhythm, or internal clock, is not meant to be tampered with in such a way. Aside from the negative health impact of daylight time, one might speculate at lost productivity as employees come into work struggling to stay awake.
So why do we continue to jump our clocks forward and backward every year?
An article on thebokey.com called "Myth Busted: Farmers fought daylight saving plan", points to the stock markets. But why would bankers and stock brokers care about this, the author asks.
"One word: Arbitrage. Securities and commodities, like wheat or soybeans, don't sell for the same price in the different markets. Arbitrage occurs when a broker buys in one market and then immediately sells it in another market to take advantage of the price difference."
After the First World War, England continued to observe daylight time while the U.S. returned to standard time. That effectively eliminated the "arbitrage hour" brokers in the U.S. had to sell commodities in the U.K. So when New York adopted daylight time, other places like Boston, Philadelphia and Cleveland were quick to follow suit so their stock exchanges were not at a disadvantage, states the article.
Putting profit ahead of peoples' health seems rather misguided. Governments love studies, so perhaps they should research the cost of daylight time in terms of lost productivity and health impacts.
They might just find the time has come to re-evaluate the so-called "necessity" of springing forward and falling back.
