I was talking with a regular at my old coffee shop, a sixty-something Glaswegian communist, about trade unions and how his dad was instrumental in the fight for the weekend with his trade union, in response I half-joked, "ok where the fuck did it go? I haven't ever had a weekend!"

I've worked a lot of jobs in the past two or three years, in a cinema, a pub, a warehouse doing nights, construction, another cinema, another pub, a small coffee shop and now a bigger coffee shop. Only one of them, which I did informally for cash, did I get a weekend which was in construction.

I didn't think much about weekends until my first pub job, I only worked about 25/30 hours a week, but as pub work is I was mainly asked to work Friday and Saturday nights every week, with only part time hours I found myself not seeing any of my friends because all the nights they wanted to see me I was working, I would regularly be asking them "can anyone do Tuesday night?" and getting an unenthusiastic response.

After that I worked night shifts which felt like the most extreme version of this, we were still in the later stages of lockdowns at this point so it wasn't as bad as it could've been, but I would semi-regularly wake up at 7 or 8pm and pour a cup of tea and grab some cereal and someone would be in my flat with a beer in their hand.

It meant that you would end up still awake in your "afternoon" with the last person to crash out at 4am who's about 9 pints in, it was great for graffiti though.

It was partially for these reasons why I wanted to work in coffee shops where the busiest days are weekdays where you have a morning rush and you're always done by 5pm.

Now though, I started a job that as I joined told me "we never work Sundays ever" so I did the smart thing and told them I have commitments on Saturdays so I would always have my weekends free, of course, after three weeks here they made the decision to open every Sunday. I requested a Sunday off to help my sister with something and have now been told that I can only have one weekend day off.

I don't work a massive amount of hours, so normally have three days off a week, but almost never consistently and it's led me to reflect more on weekends and the nature of precarious work in general.

I get my rota for Monday on Friday evening, two days of notice and never get a weekend, almost every week I need to book a weekend day off for an event or some other practical business so it leaves one day for rest or seeing my partner or friends, it's one of the first times in a long time I've really thought about getting some bullshit office job or some union job I can half-arse.

When you don't have a clear defined weekend break in between working days and you get almost no notice for your rota it makes the endless roll of shitty work feel even more relentless, you end up busy on your single days off and then a week just flows into the next and you feel the only thing you can do is quit and hope the next one is better, it's partially how I ended up on my roulette wheel of shitty jobs.

I already moan too much at friends who have professional jobs, but it really can't be overstated how much not having a weekend fucks you. You really do feel like you're just sliding through life at work all the time and squeezing in free time a handful of hours at a time. Your free time doesn't feel free because you're just recovering instead of doing what you like.

Recently I was at a demonstration and then worked three days in a row and I just couldn't get my feet to stop hurting, just standing all day not even doing a massive amount of work but having to stay upright the whole time.

I don't know what a modern fight for a weekend looks like or if it's even possible, I struggle to see anyone dropping the convenience of a 7 days a week culture anytime soon.

I can't help but feel the complete ridiculousness of people talking about a 4 day work week when I'm unable to get a weekend, it reminds me of all those articles during the lockdowns of office workers and journalists writing about how they've learnt French or made sourdough with all their time off which felt like sandpaper on my soul as I packed shelves in a N95 mask under the endless 3am fluorescent lighting of the warehouse.

Partially though I just want to highlight this constant chaos that precarious, low paid and largely service jobs are always in, the regular irregularity and complete inability to plan even a week in advance, with people talking bout a fight for a 4 day week, I say let's fight for a 5 day week first!