TCBH Postgraduate Essay Prize Winner for 2006Working-Class Consumers and the Campaign for Holidays with Pay

摘要

The Holidays With Pay Act (1938) marked the end of a twenty-year campaign for paid leisure time. The final legislation recommended, but did not mandate, one week's annual paid vacation to all full-time workers. Although the leisure habits of British workers remained relatively unchanged until after 1945, the popular campaign for paid leisure time, the report of the Holidays With Pay Committee, and the Act itself marked an important moment in British political and social history. In short, the campaign for paid holidays legitimated the leisure desires and activities of the working class and encouraged state support of the growth of inexpensive commercial leisure in the interwar years. The campaign for paid leisure and the resulting 1938 Act not only helped to create a market for mass pleasure sites, but also helped to define the types of commercial leisure appropriate for a mass of newly leisured workers. The campaign, the report and the legislation deeply implicated the state in the construction of a consuming working-class and in the expansion of commercial, class-based sites of leisure. The 1938 Holidays With Pay Act thus redefined who was considered a legitimate consumer of pleasure and what forms that commercialized pleasure should take.