THE four-day week trials, overseen by the think tank Autonomy, working with researchers from Oxford, Cambridge and Boston universities, came to an end last week.

Over 80 companies signed up to take part, promising to reduce their typical working hours by a day, but keep pay the same.

There’ll be a full report due out in February, but early results sound encouraging, with businesses reporting both happier staff and improvements in their productivity.

But the standard eight-hour day, five days a week is only a relatively recent invention. We have organised our working lives dramatically differently in the past and could do so again in the future.

Take the patterns of work in pre-industrial western Europe. Customary holidays and feast days, like the extraordinary number of saints’ days in medieval Europe, alongside assorted wakes, festivals, weddings and other disruptions, would cut the typical number of days at work to levels almost unrecognisable today.

Historian Juliet Schor has estimated that, for England in the 14th century, these days off would take up a third of the year.

In France in the same period, the monarchy guaranteed “52 Sundays, 90 rest days, and 38 holidays,” while in Spain an extraordinary five months of the year would be taken as holidays. 

This isn’t an excuse to romanticise the past. The work itself was typically backbreaking and extended, with 12 hours or more a day being needed in the fields during the busy periods of harvest.

Even so, the records we have suggest an expectation of frequent breaks for those at work — including a “customary afternoon nap.”

But it all indicates that what we take as “normal” or even “natural” in our working lives is anything but: historically, if we can exercise some control over how and when we work and are more tied to the rhythm of the seasons, we tend to work only when we really have to — like harvest time — and otherwise prefer to take our time ourselves.

Because work for almost everyone in pre-industrial Europe was so attached to the rhythms of the seasons, it created a space for those performing the work to create their own free time. There were parts of the year where there just wasn’t that much work to do. 

Where work was less directly attached to nature — in the craft occupations of the towns, for instance — customs still dictated plentiful time off, as in the questionably religious celebration of “Saint Monday,” sometimes joined by her companion “Saint Tuesday,” honoured by various trades and craftworkers in England until well into the 19th century.

It was industrial capitalism that fundamentally broke these relationships, and so stamped on society a new kind of working time and life.

Historian and ecologist Andreas Malm argues that this imposition was the exact reason the water-wheel was abandoned for the coal-powered steam engine.

Steam power, in the early 19th century, was more expensive, per watt of power produced, than what had become highly efficient water turbines in use since the Middle Ages.

But water was somewhat erratic — streams could ebb and flow — and only available in specific locations. The combination of these two things threatened to disrupt production for profit and, worst of all for the capitalist, provided an opportunity for those working in the mills to exert some control over their work against the demands of the manager and owners.

By switching to coal power, the dependence on nature was broken — and workers’ organisation effectively undermined.

Regular, monotonous, work, frequently in appalling conditions, could be imposed in the fast-growing industrial towns — with working days in the early Industrial Revolution easily stretching to 14 hours over a six-day working week.

The first successful political struggles by the new labour movement that industrial capitalism also brought into being was to win legislation to limit working hours.

By the end of the 19th century, typical hours had fallen across most branches of industry and the familiar two-day weekend was becoming the norm, even alongside some additional days’ holiday.

What we’ve seen in the last few years is just how easily disrupted those conventions can be.

The pandemic resulted in lockdowns and rearrangements of working life across society; as the worst of its shocks recede, Covid has left multiple legacies for how we work: the grim (and still poorly understood) effects of “long Covid” and long-term sickness; the large numbers choosing to work from home in some form; those who switched jobs in the “Great Resignation” and those who took the opportunity to simply work less; and, most recently, union organisation and militancy on a scale not seen in Britain for decades.

We don’t have to accept the kind of working lives on offer today — of the rigid adherence to the patterns demand industrial capitalism, for worse and worse pay.

What we can see in the different movements around the question of work, whether pushing for a reduced working time, or more flexibility in locations, or the bread-and-butter demand that work should be properly paid, is an opening up of the question and status of how, when and even why we work as we do.

We may not revive “Saint Monday” just yet. But we don’t have to accept the miserable conditions offered, either.