The three-day week, advocated recently by the Mexican multimillionaire, Carlos Slim, is such an obviously good thing, like freshly-ground coffee and reading to children, that I can’t be bothered to argue in favour of it.
The real issue is feasibility. Is it possible?
I believe so because I’ve done it myself. As a lecturer, I always tried to get my week’s teaching into three days, by working evenings, so I could have the other two free for writing. The catch is that this was successful only because I took care to let no one know what I was doing. Officially I was still working five days and so there was no offence to the five-day mindset.
The problem is that the five-day week is so long established it seems God given. And in fact this is partly true – it is a consequence of the combined interventions of God and Henry Ford, a formidable partnership. The six-day week was based on the time taken by God to create the world, a fact He should never have revealed (though few can resist bragging about their successful creations). In the early twentieth century, Henry Ford made Saturday a holiday for his workers, introducing the five-day week which quickly caught on. Having been the basic structure of most lives for almost a century, it now feels as inevitable as the cycles of the moon.
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