Shrove Monday in Academia


How it started

It’s no secret that Mainz is a carnival hot spot. Shrove Monday, the day of the biggest parade and the most frantic celebrations, is a de facto public holiday in the city. But the de facto bit is important here: the city can’t make it a proper holiday, yet nobody who can possibly avoid it is working, so (collective) bargaining is important in a very practical sense.

At Mainz U, the workers’ representatives and the leadership must have come to an Agreement shortly after the war: on Shrove Monday, food outlets, libraries, departments, and central offices always were and always will be officially geschlossen, but there is a price. Until some years ago, we used to get reminders (on the back of our payslips) of the Arrangement: during an (extended) period of Lent, employees were supposed  to work exactly 12 extra minutes per day to make up for the lost Monday. 17 minutes if you happened to be a Beamter (because of the slightly longer working week).

How it is going

Academics (who can work almost everywhere, have their own keys to the building, and are not known for their great sense of humour) used to laugh about it. Some even came in on Shrove Monday (if they could get past the hordes of drunk revellers filling the streets). But for the admin staff and even more so for the porters, janitors, or lab technicians, whose schedules were even more rigid than they are today, the Arrangement must have been a real achievement.

In the many years since the Arrangement was reached, working time has become more flexible for all employees. The 12-minutes-per-day rule was quietly dropped in accordance with that. Even working from home, an elusive privilege for many, has become the new normal, thanks to the pandemic.

And so you might think that the Arrangement, which decades ago brought some flexibility, could be handled in a flexible way this year. After all, there were no celebrations, hence no social pressure to be anywhere in particular.

Even in a pandemic, carnival is serious business
Even in a pandemic, carnival is serious business

But you would be very wrong. Just in time, the leadership reminded us that JGU observes Shrove Monday, and working from home is verboten on this very special day (which, in the absence of a parade or other distractions, had severe personal consequences for me). Explaining how this makes perfect sense from a bureaucratic/neo-corporatist point of view (I think it does) is left as an exercise to the reader.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.