Episode description
It’s simple. We work too much. There’s evidence that shows we work too much and it’s not a fun time for anyone. So what would a world with shortened work hours and no loss in pay look like?
Pretty damn good. You’d be a fool to disagree.
The weekend is a sacred thing. We live for it, we get our rest from it, but the two-day weekend as we know it has only been around for about a hundred years. The history of the work cycle across the globe is actually quite varied and at times, it gets pretty wacky.
Pretend for a moment you’re back in Ancient Roman times and the days of the ‘nundinae’. You get one day off school a week and it’s market day. You’re only allowed to set up shop or for a real treat, you could go to the market and spend your coin. There’s also church, if you’re lucky. Not much of a day of rest, but it could be worse.
Then there’s England in the 17th century, where we see a glimmer of the beginnings of the two-day weekend. Along with Sunday, workers sneaked Monday off (they called it ‘Saint Monday’), to go to church and worship. And by ‘go to church’ and ‘worship’ we mean, ‘go to the pub and get pissed’. Unsurprisingly, workers liked this. Bosses, not so much.
Goodbye, Saint Monday. You’ve been fun.
None of this really sounds ideal but don’t worry - it gets worse.
Fast forward to 1929 and the Soviet Union, where Yuri Larin, economist and politician with a little too much imagination (to put it politely) decided it would be great to abolish weekends altogether. This aimed to both solve the current post-revolution economic problem and help to crush the power of religion. Fun! Thankfully, this only lasted a couple of years and workers returned to having their one day of rest per week.
While work cycles still vary across different cultures, the two-day weekend idea that was first instituted by an American cotton mill in 1908 has stuck. But can working conditions become even better for us as time goes on?
We know that 2023 is not where history ends, and there might be hope for us yet. Over the last five years, a not-for-profit community called 4 Day Week Global have organised a series of pilot studies around the world to trial a four-day workweek. We swoon at the thought.
There are varied ways that companies are rolling out the shortened work hours strategy, but the good news is that they’ve seen increased productivity and a huge boost in general well-being amongst workers across the board.
Is it realistic to run the workforce this way? Can we still generate profit within a shortened week? Could this really be the way of the future?! We’ll let the stats speak for themselves.
PRIOR EPISODES MENTIONED:
- The Soviet Space Tractor!
- Karoshi Means Worked To Death (no exclamation mark)
- Dozenalism!
- How To Sabotage Your Workplace with OG Spy William Joseph Donovan
SOURCES:
- A Failed Soviet Experiment Offers A Warning To Today’s Burnout Generation, in AOGA Eye on Design
- Four-Day Work Weeks: Current Research and Practice, by Rex L Facer II and Lori L Wadsworth, in Connecticut Law Review
- Soviet Experience with Shortening the Workweek, by David W Bronson in the ILR Review
- Who invented the weekend? BBC Bitesize
- Working Hours, by Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, on Our World in Data
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