Workweek

The enterprises carried the five-day workweek.

We are aiming at establishing the five-day workweek.

The French government made a 35-hour workweek mandatory in 2000.

The five day workweek was invented in the 20th century.

The International Labour Organization defines a workweek exceeding 48 hours as excessive.

Mrs. Lienemann, the French Housing Minister, sees socialist and ecological forces proposing what she calls “a new culture”—perhaps named “Ecosocialism”—that might, she believes, work for innovations like a 32-hour workweek, more democracy at the workplace, and “a greater stress on quality than quantity in everyday life.”

That trial, which began the same week as the elections that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, remains a symbol, to a certain sort of Englishman, of the societywide breakdown of the 1970s, which was a decade of currency devaluations, crippling strikes, uncollected garbage and shortened workweeks.