Work Time

From today’s perspective, premodern work relations can seem like an endless ordeal—theoretically, there was no such thing as free time. Of course, in practice it was not so awful. In the country, the natural cycle meant work was less harsh in the winter, while in the city it meant craftspeople worked shorter hours (artificial lighting was a luxury). The numerous holidays and religious ceremonies brought relief.²

In this context, things took a turn for the worse in the eighteenth century—for rationalists of the Enlightenment, the large number of Church holidays were a smokescreen for idleness and indolence.³ With the development of machines and lighting, the nineteenth century made it possible to exploit workers to a greater degree. In the 1860s a “workday” in industry could be twelve or thirteen hours.⁴

Labor groups fought to reduce the number of working hours, though some conservatives supported the cause as well. They raised the danger of impiety, which would arise from the fact that factory workers were not even able to rest on Sundays, and also that they could not make it to church for mass.⁵ Moreover, the “new liberalism” (not to be confused with contemporary neoliberalism) that appeared in the early twentieth century urged reform.

Reforms did come along, though they were slow at first. In the USA and Great Britain, “of the roughly 25-hour reduction in the work week between 1860 and 1990, perhaps 5 or 6 hours were eliminated before 1890.”⁶ Before 1900, British laborers worked 53–54 hours a week.⁷

After World War One, the International Labor Organization was created along with the Treaty of Versailles. One postulate was “to employ the eight-hour work day or forty-eight-hour work week as a goal to be reached wherever it has yet to be achieved,” though it was acknowledged that “differences in climate, habits and customs, economic conditions and industrial traditions impede the immediate accomplishment of utterly uniform labor conditions” (art. 427).

In postwar Europe, legislation on the eight-hour work day was universally accepted. Despite many abuses, it has not been a pure fiction⁸—in 1914 in Spain fewer than fourteen per cent of workers enjoyed a forty-eight-hour work week, while fifteen years later this was ninety-three per cent.⁹

The Great Depression brought a reversal of perspectives—factories stopped working full hours, reducing the time that workers were needed, and as a result, their wages.¹⁰ People worked less than they wanted to.

Nor was the issue of work time in agriculture considered in the interwar period—the “from dawn to dusk” principle held good here, at least in the summer. The later twentieth century brought more reductions in work hours, though this time this did not entail a drop in living standards, as was the case after 1929. In 2000, France adopted the thirty-five-hour work week¹¹—the economic and social consequences of this decision remain debatable, however, and with the appearance of various intermediate forms of employment, this number does not translate into worker satisfaction as it once did. Nonetheless, this decision is a certain reference point for debates held in other countries.

On the other hand, the increase of free days in the form of paid vacation is a positive change—this only started to appear in most European countries in the 1930s.