Say goodbye to the weekend! Sunday trading is another Osborne 'job creation' con to entrench a 24/7 low-wage economy

Weekends. As a journalist, I have worked a great many. Millions more, like nurses and firefighters, also frequently have to toil on Saturdays and Sundays.

But I also think it’s important that as many other workers as possible should have two predictable days at the end of each week to spend relaxing with family and friends.

Yet I fear that the weekend rest - a right fought for and won by trade unions a century ago - will, within a generation, go the way of Luncheon Vouchers and Green Shield Stamps and one day be viewed as an odd relic of the past.

George Osborne has paved the way for this possibility by allowing Sunday trading hours in big English stores to be extended beyond the national six-hour maximum.

In his axe-swinging “emergency” budget tomorrow, the constantly calculating Chancellor will give local authorities the power to decide opening hours.

And, as first cities and big towns clamour to bring in 24/7 trading, other councils will soon be pressured into following suit in order to avoid losing business to neighbours.

While I will be happy to be able to pop to Asda before 11am on Sundays, I also know that extended trading will make it harder for other families to spend time together, go to church – like I did as a child with my devout Catholic mum, a former shop worker – or, indeed, get a much-needed lie-in (as I might have liked).

I also know that this move augurs a potentially worse life for those who currently only labour between Monday and Friday.

One unmentioned reason Osborne is likely to be keen for Britons to kiss goodbye to peaceful Sunday mornings is because longer retail opening hours will allow him to further cement his low-wage economy.

Under Osbornomics, the soaring number of minimum wage workers can never expect a meaningful pay rise or rent reduction - and now the Chancellor also wants to cut the tax credits and housing benefits that allow these unfortunate people to scrape by.

That means the poorest workers – with 2.5million Britons now earning within 50p of the £6.50 minimum wage – will have to work more hours to make ends meet.

And opening supermarkets and other shops, where the lowest paid people tend to work, to open for up to 18 extra hours on a Sunday is the easiest and quickest way to make this possible.

With Britons already working the third longest hours in Europe (behind Austrians and, interestingly, Greeks), the Chancellor had to do something radical to be able to squeeze more out of the population.

Also, rather conveniently for the Government, extending Sunday openings – and encouraging people to take low-paid second jobs in stores – will allow Osborne to, once again, claim he is creating jobs.

As long as employment figures keep ticking upwards, however much low pay and insecurity spreads, the Chancellor and PM’s heir apparent knows he can hide the grim reality of his “long-term economic plan” of rolling back the state and turning what remains of public expenditure into purely a revenue stream for private profit.

If you want to imagine such a future now, think of the record taxpayer subsidies to inefficient private rail operators and then expand that model to every other service.

It is this farcical corporate state system of private profit for public investment and risk – with the woeful railways and bank bailouts being just the better-known examples of its failures – that has allowed economic productivity to slump.

And that is the other reason why Osborne is keen to extend working hours – with retail only the start of an incremental journey towards eradicating the traditional weekend.

He has to make up for the fact that the French and Germans can produce in four days what Britons can only manage in five.

Our private firms are too busy passing on profits to shareholders to bother investing in skills or technology that would enable productivity to keep pace with, let alone match, other major economies.

When Margaret Thatcher ushered in a system of unrestrained corporate greed that lavished tax breaks, cheap state asset sales, cash injections and weakened worker rights on profiteers while also allowing a decline in their investment, she could rely on a rising number of skilled women joining the workforce to keep output rising.

No such leap can be made today, apart from a surge in migrants, but they place pressure on infrastructure and services in a way that additional working mothers never did in the 1980s.

Instead, if we are to maintain the rich-enriching and poor-impoverishing status quo, more people need to be employed for less money over more days in order for our economy to continue growing at a similar rate to those like Germany, whose better-paid ordinary workers can produce more for less effort.

Therefore, routinely idle Saturdays and Sundays simply cannot be part of George Osborne’s economic plan.

So, unless things change considerably, be prepared to say goodbye to the weekend.