Designing For People

Henry Dreyfuss was something of a visionary…

The real triumph of the American way of life is that although the work week has steadily shrunk, productivity has steadily risen. In 1800 the average work week was eighty-four hours, a century ago it was seventy hours, in 1925 it was forty-five hours. Today the forty-hour week is almost standard, the two-day week end is almost universal, three-week vacations with pay are more and more the practice and the coffee break has become an institution. Despite all this, average production per man-hour increased forty-eight per cent between 1928 and 1953. And not long ago, it was forcast that the average work week in 1975 will not exceed thirty-two hours. -Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People, 1955

Wikipedia provides data for typical annual labor hours around the globe. The work week comes out to be 31.17 hours on average in the USA.