15.4 — Work, the Weekend and the Shape of a Life

The eight-hour working day was demanded before it was granted, and the slogan that won it was written in 1817 by a Welsh mill owner named Robert Owen:

Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.

It took about a century to become normal.

Almost every feature of an ordinary week and an ordinary life — the length of the working day, the two-day weekend, the school-leaving age, the retirement age — was either fought for by organised labour or imposed by a state for its own reasons. None of it is natural, and all of it is recent.

The working day

Chapter 9.5 described the early factory: twelve to sixteen hour days, six days a week, including for children.

Why factories worked those hours. Fixed capital. A machine that is idle earns nothing, so the owner's incentive is to run it as long as workers can be found to operate it. Before machines, work followed the task and the daylight; after them, it followed the plant.

How it changed.

Legislation first, and it began with children. The British Factory Act of 1833 limited children's hours and — critically — created factory inspectors, because a law with no inspection is advice (Chapter 13.1). The Ten Hours Act of 1847 limited women and young people, which in practice limited everyone because the production line could not run without them.

Then organisation. The eight-hour movement from the 1860s. The Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886 — a rally for the eight-hour day, a bomb, and the execution of four anarchists after a trial widely regarded as unsound — is the origin of May Day as international workers' day (Chapter 15.3).

And then a manufacturer worked out that it was profitable. Henry Ford introduced the five-dollar day in 1914, roughly doubling wages, and the five-day forty-hour week by 1926.

His reasoning was not philanthropy and he said so. Turnover at his plants had been extraordinary — the work was monotonous and people left constantly — and the cost of recruiting and training replacements exceeded the cost of paying more. Productivity per hour was higher in a shorter day. And, the argument he made publicly, workers with money and time are customers.

The International Labour Organization's first convention, in 1919, set the eight-hour day and forty-eight-hour week as an international standard.

And India's Factories Act of 1948 codifies it: nine hours a day, forty-eight a week, with overtime at double rates. Its enforcement covers the formal sector, which is a minority of Indian employment, and the large informal sector operates outside it — which is Chapter 9.14's structural problem appearing in daily life.

The weekend

The two-day weekend is younger than most people assume and its origin is specifically about religion.

Sunday was the Christian rest day and the single day off.

Saturday was added because of Jewish workers. In American and British factories with Jewish employees, absence on Saturday for the sabbath was a recurring problem, and the practical answer was to close on both days. A New England mill is documented granting a five-day week in 1908 for exactly this reason.

"Saint Monday" is the other half of the story. Workers in nineteenth-century Britain frequently did not turn up on Mondays, having drunk on Sunday. Employers found that granting Saturday afternoon off reduced Monday absence — a trade that suited both sides — and the half-day Saturday became common before the full day did.

Ford's 1926 five-day week made it a standard, and it spread through legislation and union agreement over the following decades.

And the four-day week is the current version of the same argument. Trials in Iceland, the UK, and elsewhere have reported maintained or improved output with reduced hours and better reported wellbeing. The trials are mostly in office-based work, are self-selected, and are not conclusive — and the direction of the finding is consistent with the century of evidence that hours and productivity are not proportional.

Retirement

The idea that a person stops working at a fixed age and is supported afterwards is about 140 years old, and it was invented as a political manoeuvre.

Bismarck introduced old-age insurance in Germany in 1889 (Chapter 10.7), explicitly to undercut the socialists by giving workers a stake in the state.

The initial age was 70, later reduced to 65.

And the standard claim that this was set above life expectancy is misleading. Life expectancy at birth in Germany then was around 40, which is dominated by infant and child mortality (Chapter 3.3). A man who reached 60 could expect a further decade or more. The pension was for a real and modest population, not a theoretical one.

The 60-to-65 range then spread internationally — the American Social Security Act of 1935 chose 65, largely following existing state and European schemes rather than on any actuarial principle.

India's central government retirement age is 60, with variations by service and by state, and the private sector generally follows it.

And the arithmetic has broken. When the ratio of workers to pensioners is high, a pay-as-you-go system works. As life expectancy rises and fertility falls, the ratio falls, and the same promise costs more per worker.

Which produces the current pension argument everywhere. Raise the retirement age, raise contributions, reduce benefits, or shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution. India made that shift for new central government employees in 2004, moving to the National Pension System, and the political pressure to reverse it has been substantial — which is the same argument running in France, in Brazil and in China.

And there is a health finding worth stating. The evidence on whether retirement is good for people is mixed and depends heavily on whether the retirement is voluntary and whether the person retains purpose and social contact. Forced retirement from a job that provided both is associated with worse outcomes. Volume V covers the ageing side.

Schooling

Compulsory mass schooling is a nineteenth-century state project and its motives were not primarily educational.

Prussia is the model — compulsory attendance from the early eighteenth century, systematised in the nineteenth — and the stated purposes included producing disciplined soldiers, obedient subjects and literate administrators.

The industrial motive. A factory workforce needs punctuality, literacy, numeracy and the habit of working to a bell — which is a fair description of what a school day trains.

And the emancipatory motive was also real. Reformers argued for schooling as a route out of poverty and as a precondition for citizenship, and they were right (Chapter 9.4).

Both motives operated at once, and the institution served both.

The specific artefacts. The long summer holiday is frequently attributed to the agricultural calendar and the actual history is more urban — it derives substantially from the impossibility of schooling in unventilated city buildings in summer heat and from the practice of wealthier families leaving the city. The age-graded classroom, the timetable and the bell are Prussian-derived and are the reason a school looks the way it does everywhere.

India's Right to Education Act, 2009, made schooling for ages 6 to 14 a fundamental right, sixty-two years after independence (Chapter 9.14).

The life course as a construction

Put the pieces together and a modern life has a shape that did not exist before industrialisation.

Childhood as a protected period — a nineteenth-century idea, established by removing children from work and putting them in schools.

Adolescence as a distinct stage — named and studied in the early twentieth century, and made possible by extending education past puberty.

A working life of fixed hours in a fixed place.

Retirement.

And a fourth age of extended old age, which is entirely new: the years of reasonable health after work and before serious decline barely existed as a mass experience before the twentieth century.

Before industrialisation, most people worked from childhood until they physically could not, and the boundaries between these stages did not exist.

What is changing now

Four pressures on the arrangement.

Remote and hybrid work, accelerated by 2020, which unpicks the assumption that work happens at a place — and which has produced a new problem: the boundary that the commute used to enforce.

The gig and platform economy, which restores a pre-industrial pattern of piece-work paid by task, without the protections that were built around employment.

Longer lives, which makes a forty-year working life supporting a thirty-year retirement arithmetically difficult.

And automation, which is the oldest fear in this chapter and has so far consistently changed the composition of work rather than the quantity — with the important qualification that the transitions have been painful for the people in them (Chapter 9.12).

Where this shows up in your life

Every structural feature of your week was decided by somebody, usually after a fight.

And the practical point. The five-day week, the eight-hour day, paid leave, the weekend, the ban on child labour and the pension were not delivered by economic growth automatically. They were legislated, after organisation, against opposition (Chapter 9.5).

Which is worth knowing in both directions: they can be extended, and they can be lost. The large and growing share of work outside formal employment — in India the majority of it — is work to which most of these protections do not apply, and that is the live question in labour policy everywhere.

What the next page covers

Chapter 15.5 covers languages — where the world's roughly seven thousand languages came from, how the families relate, why some spread and others did not, what happens when a language dies and how fast that is happening, and India's own extraordinary linguistic situation, which is one of the most complex on Earth and which the Constitution had to accommodate.