Summer time all year would work for me, but I do appreciate that there are many occupations where this wouldn't be acceptable. I can imagine a dairy farmer at 05:00 in mid-winter might appreciate a little extra warmth and earlier daylight.
Dairy farming is actually one of the occupations where the time change is harder because the cows are ready for milking regardless of the time on the clock. At least according to my uncle who used to be a small time dairy farmer.
> Dairy farming is actually one of the occupations where the time change is harder because the cows are ready for milking regardless of the time on the clock.
Twice a year I hear that, and twice a year I ask: "why on Earth do you pretend you have to follow the clock?" and I also ask "supposing you still want to follow the clock for whatever reason, what is the problem of shifting gradually over a week or two?", seasonal changes are much larger than official time changes anyway.
And there are plenty of outdoor jobs where the time to start in the morning is different in summertime: starting earlier in summer to avoid the hottest part of the afternoon, sometimes doubled with less work hours per day.
One has to follow the clock on their interactions with others. They have suppliers delivering food, distributors picking up the milk, part-time workers that have other jobs, etc. I'm sure transitioning helps, but that still leaves at least two weeks each year during which the routines are screwed up.
As did I (well, a worker on one) and to an extent you're right. It depends on when the morning milking time is "set". Is it 05:00 summer time, which then becomes 04:00 in winter? Or 05:00 in winter, which then become 06:00 in summer?
We generally operated on the second one.
Also, over the period of six months, times can be gradually changed by one hour quite easily. Moving the milking time 10 minutes here and there adds up quite quickly.
No matter how hard you try, sometimes milking times slip anyway. Broken vacuum pump? Milking's waiting while you fix it.
Anyway, I just used dairying as an example. I think the dark winter start problem would be similar for many outdoor manual labouring jobs.
Before I had kids I would often just plow through the time change without changing anything, because my job had enough flexibility that it wasn't a problem. Generally in a few weeks I'd be "back on schedule" but I didn't have to deal with any sort of shock, which for me was at least modestly bad. (I know people who have it worse, but I'm certainly far from the "Eh, I'll just get up an hour earlier without any particular effort or consequence" some people seem to have.)
Now that I have kids, I'm tied to the school system and can't ignore it. Much less pleasant.
