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.
These assumptions no longer hold. Far too many people are in work but living in poverty and precarity, and many well-paid jobs that do exist today feel precarious. Unlike earlier waves of automation, digital transformation and artificial intelligence are reshaping clerical, professional and entry‑level white‑collar work and they are doing so at speed.
Employers know that large‑scale job displacement risks undermining consumer demand, but competitive pressure pushes them to automate anyway. As a result, we risk having the mother of all market failures. The result is not a smooth transition to higher‑quality work, but a precarious scramble in which wages, job security and career ladders are weakened faster than new opportunities emerge. This forces households to take on more debt to maintain their spending, which isn't fair or sustainable.
This matters for how we think about working time. A shorter version of a broken model is still broken. In an AI‑shocked labour market, cutting hours without rethinking the structure and purpose of work risks entrenching insecurity rather than reducing it.
The deeper problem is that paid employment can no longer be assumed to provide a reliable route to income, identity or social value. That assumption underpinned the weekend. It does not survive contact with an AI‑driven economy in which stable jobs are thinning out and risk is increasingly individualised.
So the challenge today is not just about how long we work, but also about what work is for, and who gets to decide.
In a carbon‑constrained, AI‑powered economy, we need to actively shape the kinds of human activity we want more of. This includes work where human judgement, care, creativity and responsibility are indispensable — whether that is in care, education, counselling, culture or community‑building — and where AI should augment rather than replace human contribution. It should also mean a revival of cooperative, mutual and collective forms of organising work, long-marginalised by shareholder‑driven corporate models.
None of this is possible without rebuilding worker power and collective protection. The idea that a simple universal basic income can paper over the disruption caused by AI underestimates both the scale of change and the importance of shared institutions. Cash alone cannot replace secure housing, public services, stable communities or democratic control over economic life.
The more urgent question is what everyone should be guaranteed, regardless of how much paid work they do: access to high‑quality public services, genuine economic security, and a well-resourced public realm that allows people to flourish beyond the labour market.
Today’s politics feels painfully small by comparison to the immensity of these challenges, which explains why so many feel hopeless about what the future might hold. Faced with anxiety about automation and jobs, too many leaders chase marginal employment gains or promise that the market will adjust. What is missing is a serious vision for how work, income and power should relate to one another in an economy where machines increasingly outperform humans in many paid tasks. What is also missing is a clarity on who will need to organise to deliver the changes we need. Unions have been decimated and, in any case, this is no longer just a question of sections of the workforce standing up for themselves: today’s resistance has to be grounded in broader movements, more global in nature and more radical in its ambitions.
The weekend was never just about leisure. It was a collective assertion of dignity, autonomy and the right to a life beyond work. On its 100th birthday, the task is not merely to keep shortening the working week, but also to reclaim the spirit that won the weekend in the first place: the determination to shape economic change around human needs, not the other way around.
