Work and Leisure

Chapter 12Work and leisureThemes and issuesJohn T. Haworth and A. J. VealA leisure society, or a society with more leisureIt is always foolhardy to attempt to predict the future, but we are continuallydriven to do so. In the area of work and leisure we should be doubly cautious,in light of some ignominious past attempts, particularly predictions of thecoming of a leisure society. The fallibility of such predictions is a persistenttheme of a number of chapters in this book. The leisure society, as envisagedby various commentators, from the 1920s to the 1960s, was to be broughtabout as a result of the process of technological advances making humanlabour increasingly unnecessary. Goods would be produced in greater andgreater abundance by automated processes, such that human society wouldbe able to satisfy its needs with less and less expenditure of labour. As manyof the chapters in this book suggest, such a future is no longer seen as imminent.Technology has certainly produced immeasurably more material wealthin the West, but the anticipated leisure society has not emerged – at least, notyet. Despite gains in leisure time achieved during the course of the twentiethcentury, paid and unpaid work is perceived as the dominant activity in mostadults’ lives. And in recent years it appears to have become more rather thanless dominant.It can be argued that considerable progress has been made towards a ‘societywith more leisure’ in the past 150 years. As indicated in Chapter 1, theaverage full-time paid ‘working year’ is half what it was at the height of theindustrial revolution and, due to the higher school-leaving age and prolongedlife expectancy in the developed economies, the amount of a person’s totalwaking lifetime spent in leisure is now greater than the amount spent in paidwork (Veal 1987: 16). However, as indicated in a number of chapters inthis book, progress towards even a ‘society with more leisure’ appears tohave stalled in Western societies, and perhaps gone into reverse, since thelate 1970s.