THE THIRD WAVE
The reason is that the Third Wave, as it sweeps in, carries with it a completely different sense of tune. If the Second Wave tied life to the tempo of the machine, the Third Wave challenges this mechanical synchronization, alters our most basic social rhythms, and in so doing frees us from the machine.
Once we understand this, it comes as no surprise that one of the fastest-spreading innovations in industry during the 1970’s was “fiextime”—an arrangement that permits workers, within predetermined limits, to choose their own working hours. Instead of requiring everyone to arrive at the factory gate or the office at the same time, or even at pre-fixed staggered times, the company operating on fiextime typically sets certain core hours when everyone is expected to show up, and specifies other hours as flexible. Each employee may choose which of the flexible hours he or she wishes to spend working.
This means that a “day person”—a person whose biological rhythms routinely awaken him or her early in the morning—can choose to arrive at work at, say, 8:00 A.M., while a “night person,” whose metabolism is different, can choose to start working at 10:00 or 10:30 A.M. It means that an employee can take tune off for household chores, or to shop, or to take a child to the doctor. Groups of workers who wish to go bowling together early in the morning or late in the afternoon can jointly set then* schedules to make it possible. In short, time itself is being de-massified.
The flextime movement began in 1965 when a woman economist in Germany, Christel Kammerer, recommended it as a way to bring more mothers into the job market. In 1967 Masserschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, the “Deutsche Boeing,” discovered that many of its workers were arrivingat work worn out from fighting rush-hour traffic. Management gingerly experimented by allowing 2,000 workers to go off the rigid eight-to-five schedule and to choose their own hours. Within two years all 12,000 of its employees were on flextime and some departments had even given up the requirements for everyone to be there during core time.
In 1972 Europa magazine reported that “. . . in some 2,-000 West German firms, the national concept of rigid punctuality has vanished beyond recall. The reason is the introduction of Gleitzeit”; i.e.,“sliding” or “flexible” hours. By 1977 fully a fourth of the West German work force, more
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