What's the problem with 'Thank God it's Friday' culture?

The debate about Amazon’s punishing work culture, alleged by the New York Times article and ex-Amazon employees, illustrates an issue that seems to affect many employees.

TGIF culture. The relief that the last day of the working week has arrived. The #fridayfeeling Twitter trend. That feeling you've got right now (assuming you’re reading this just after we've posted!)

When employees live for the weekend, what does this say about today’s work culture and working hours?

The eight-hour day is a relatively recent invention. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, workers and trade unions began to push for fewer hours. Until the 1900s, poor working conditions and strenuous working times were the norm, with ten-hour days and sixty-hour weeks (Sunday was the only day of rest).

In the first quarter of the 1900s, countries began to establish labour laws, such as the Eight Hours Act in New South Wales, Australia and a national eight-hour day law in Spain. This gave rise to a new structure: the five-day week. And that, in turn, gave us the weekend – TGIF!

Global work culture, on the whole, has come a long way since the downtrodden factory workers of the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays, workers have more rights than ever before. But there are interesting parallels between the two – smartphones and the internet mean that it’s possible to access work at any time of the day or night, leading to longer hours and more time spent at work. In the case of Amazon, the NYT exposé alleged that colleagues frequently received emails during the night, with prompts by text message if they didn’t respond quickly.

In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, 39% of online workers said that technology gave them more flexibility in the hours they work, but a similar percentage (35%) also said that using technology increased their working hours.

In the midst of the debate about flexible work culture, perhaps the question we should ask is whether we are experiencing a reversal of the twentieth century pattern towards a less arduous work culture. It seems that many workers are stuck on a repetitive cycle: racing towards the weekend, but being unable to let go of the technology that binds them to work.

“We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines” -  Wendell Berry

We all need to take breaks to benefit our physical and mental health (yes, even high-performing overachievers at world-leading tech companies), but if employees are to be truly engaged, work shouldn't be something that they’re continually struggling to escape.