This year marks 100 years of one of the most consequential and widely-felt victories of the labour movement; the weekend. In May 1926 many British workers started to shift to a five‑day week, and later that year Henry Ford entrenched the weekend across his factories in the United States.
As my colleague George Bangham has shown, average working hours in the UK have steadily fallen from around 60 hours a week in the late 19th century, to roughly 45 hours a century ago, to about 32 hours today. No wonder growing numbers of UK workers today are interested in four day weeks and shorter working hours.
But the weekend’s centenary is also a reminder that the 20th‑century economic logic around work is now breaking down. We saw technological change create as many jobs as it destroyed; more people, especially women, moved into paid employment; strong unions protected workers’ interests; rising incomes delivered widespread security and prosperity for workers; and more people with more disposable income created more demand in the economy, creating more jobs and so on.
