The three-day Work Week

2 min readAug 24, 2023

Discussions on the benefits of the three-day workweek and how much time workers spend at work are nothing new.

The five-day workweek was officially introduced in 1932 and was a highly controversial idea because people originally worked six days a week before the reforms.

The five-day workweek was first introduced by the car manufacturer and businessman Harry Ford in 1926; the reason for this reform was not born out of any love for workers companies don’t give a shit about the workforce.

But what they only care about is profit and result.

With this attitude, you may wonder why this reform to a five-day workweek was introduced in the first place.

The answer is quite simple: in the 1920s, a man working in car manufacturing was today’s modern equivalent of a web developer or a person working in tech.

What Harry Ford did by introducing a five-day work was to steal highly skilled labour from his competition and ensure that his workforce would have more leisure time, which those people could use to buy more goods and services.

Workers with more free time spend more money on food, clothing, vehicles and other products and services in their spare time.

If they have more free time, it will lead to economic growth, which is a benefit and a driver of the consumer-led economy.

With people having more free time if there is a move to a three-day working week, they will spend more money on goods and services, improving the overall health of the economy.