[throwaway123001]

The consultations might have had a different result if there had been a practical multiple-choice test with questions that link the idea of DST to actual consequences. Like:

Would you like to go to work in the light or in the dark during winter time?

Would you like to have some daylight while having barbecue at 9pm in the summer.

...

(My concern is that people had no idea of the practical consequences beside sucks-to-have-to-get-up-one-hour-earlier and will be in for a rude awakening)

[nybble41]

Whether you go to work in the light or in the dark is determined by your work schedule relative to the local solar day/night cycle. Not DST. If you want to drive to work in daylight, negotiate for your working hours to start after sunrise. If you'd prefer some sunlight after work ends, negotiate for your working hours to end before sunset. Keep in mind that you won't get both year-round at most latitudes simply because a typical work day is longer than the length of visible daylight in winter. (What would probably make the most sense would be 10-12 hour work days in the summer and 4-6 hour work days in the winter, centered around solar noon, but that's likely to face strong opposition from both sides.)

The only _practical_ consequences of DST vs non-DST lie in whether we try to force everyone to shift their schedules all at once twice a year or leave it to individuals and businesses to set their schedules as they see fit.

There are no practical consequences for permanent-standard-time vs. permanent-summer-time. Either way, people will adjust their schedules to suit local conditions just as they do now, but without the complication of abrupt time changes in the spring and fall. My preference would be to place local noon as close as possible to solar noon (+/- 45 minutes, to permit one-hour time zone offsets without splitting up dense urban areas) so that morning and afternoon are approximately the same length, but I wouldn't call that a _practical_ difference, as long as the offset from solar noon is consistent. It's more a matter of aesthetics, in particular a distaste for needless complexity.

[throwaway123001]

What stores or businesses allow to choose their opening time or beginning of shifts like that?

That might work for an office worker but beside these?

[nybble41]

All of them? It's not like private stores or businesses are legally required to be open at specific times. They decide for themselves when to open and how to lay out their shifts. It's normal to have some variation in operating hours between different businesses.

Individual employees don't necessarily have the option of setting their own personal hours, especially for shift work, but if there's a clear preference among the group then they have a decent chance of getting the business to adapt its hours to suit the majority.

This is ignoring certain jurisdictions which have made the short-sighted mistake of hard-coding specific hours into local employment laws. Such laws would need to be updated, of course, to reflect this or any other time zone change.

[acqq]

Exactly. Basing the policy of the whole Union on the internet votes is... just wrong.