Work and Leisure

28 A. J. Vealaccumulation’ as discussed elsewhere in this book, caused further economicdisruption. Thus by the 1990s, as will be discussed, working hours in someWestern countries stopped falling, and even began to rise again, and talk of a‘leisure society’ all but disappeared.Since it is this ‘crisis’ in the work, leisure, material rewards balance, characterisedby pressure on working hours and its consequences for leisure andwell-being, which forms the basis of much of the rest of the book, thischapter concludes with an historical overview of trends in working hours.Trends in working hoursJuliet Schor, in The Overworked American (1991), drew on numerous sourcesto analyse trends in working hours, initially in England and later in theUnited States and United Kingdom, over a 750-year period. This analysissuggests that typical working hours for peasants and casual labourers inthirteenth-century, pre-industrial England may have been as low as 1500hours per annum, rising to 2000 in the fifteenth century. Schor notes thatrecords indicate that peasants worked their land for only 150 days a year andother groups of hired workers were employed for only 175–80 days a year.Further, she notes:All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probablyabout one-third of the year. And the English were apparently workingharder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported tohave guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eightholidays. In Spain, travellers noted that holidays totalled five months ayear.(Schor 1991: 47)However, ‘working their land’ is an ambivalent term, in that it may excludethe time worked on the feudal lord’s land. In medieval Europe half of allpeasants were serfs, required to work their lord’s land as well as their own(Sylvester 2000: 5–6). Marx saw this as a forerunner of the capitalist systemof extracting ‘surplus value’ and indicates how the amount of work requiredby the lord was, in the hands of unscrupulous, almost without limit (Marx1930 [1867]: 238–9).With the coming of industrialisation, however, working hours increased,reaching over 3000 a year in the mid-nineteenth century (Schor 1991:45).However, estimates of working hours for manual worker provided by Youngand Willmott (1973), as shown in Figure 1.1, indicate that the range of theseestimates prior to the twentieth century is wide.Having reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, working hoursbegan to fall substantially, as a result, initially, of restrictions on workinghours for women and children, followed by the campaign for the eight-hour