Letter: Less time off, please

Sir: Michael Hager ("Let's have an eight-day week", 21 July) is about 50 years too late when he calls for more leisure time.

In an agrarian or labour-intensive industrial culture, people needed time off to rest after long hours in the fields or working the blast furnace. In a knowledge-based economy where hard labour has more or less disappeared, people already have long hours to fill. Working life begins after adolescence and ends in middle age. Work is now often sedentary and housework is automated. Who needs more time off?

If I were to ask our politicians to show political courage to change the calendar, a more important change would be to remove the artificiality of 24 different time zones around the world. Why not a single one-world clock? Is it really necessary, in a 24-hour global economy, to give 24 different names to the same time?

CHRIS PAYNE

Uxbridge, Middlesex