In a parallel universe, there is no such thing as "holidays" or "weekends". People work every day, 365 days a year. Every day is a "normal" day, there are no celebrations whatsnotever.
My questions are:
What developent could lead to such a situation?
What effects on economics and especially the work market would it have?
Assuming an 8 hour work day and no drop in worker efficiency, the two extra work days would increase the labor supply by at least 40%.
This could have come about from a society which has a great need for human labor. Possibilities include...
There could be an external or internal threat which makes it necessary to maximize production. War, famine, disease... take your pick.
If the society is industrialized they have less need for labor, so increasing the labor pool would lead to unemployment or make-work. In that case, this becomes a distopean "make work" program. Reasons include...
With everyone working eight hours every day, sleeping eight hours every day, and having to recover from work every day there's greatly reduced time for a personal life. This restricts personal and economic possibilities.
Nobody can travel more than a few hours from work. No family vacations. No trips to a foreign country. People will stay at home. Long distance travel will all be for business. Out of town tourism will be almost non-existent. People will rarely leave their home area. Everything will be more provincial in nature.
Every personal project must be able to be broken up into eight hour chunks. Aside from the obvious problems with your personal life, there would be numerous problems for entrepreneurs. There is less time off to investigate starting a new business or learning a new craft or tinkering with an invention.
To accommodate total employment, if the society has good lighting, things would not be left idle at night. There would likely be work shifts around the clock. This would create a 24 hour society.
With no holidays, and a 24 hour society, there's no infrastructure downtime for repairs and maintenance. Repairs and upgrades would regularly interfere with the constant flow of people, information and goods. Infrastructure would have to be made extra redundant so it can be taken down for repairs and inspection.
Entertainment would shift towards what can be done quickly and easily by people physically or mentally exhausted by work every day. Drinking, drugs, and passive entertainment (watching professional sports, TV, and movies) would be the norm.
I'd say that rather than the puritan "no work on Sunday" they take the dirtian philosophy of "work work work work work..." Or they have a group of particularly industrious people(Asians) who do math and study /work ask day. Soon the only way to compete is to work 12 hours a day.
The point of weekends and holidays is so people have time off.
A) Because working is stressful and you need down time. If you took that away, I imagine depression and suicide rates would go through the roof. So unless people aren't humans, it's not going to be beneficial. People are more efficient when they're happy and rested anyways.
B) Because what's the point of working if you don't have time to enjoy the fruit of your labor? The tourism industry lives on people having free time to spend money.
You could tweak holidays and have random days off instead. Sunday is a Bible thing after all, there's no reason a society without bibles and stuff would choose Sunday over Florbtag. Same goes for a number of holidays. As for other holidays, celebrations might be in order for big historical events, but that doesn't mean it has to be non-working days.
So you could do away with weekends and holidays, but you'd still need time off, because humans can't operate full time all the time.
