A few interesting pieces of history may help here. Let me try to complement Gregory Rader's excellent economics-based answer with a historical one.

1. Actually there WAS some reduction in work for some classes of middle-class white collar people for about a couple of decades in the US (1919 - 1929 and 1945 - 1965). A depression interrupted the first one, and global competition interrupted the second phase.
2. There were huge gains for blue collar workers during the initial decades of the labor movement, as some of the benefits of better productivity were cashed out as more leisure for workers. Then of course, automation and machines turned into threats and started eliminating the jobs.
3. The case of women is particularly interesting. First they fought for the right to work, and made huge gains especially in World War II. Then they lost it all to unwanted leisure due to the "feminine mystique" effect in the post war decades and sat around twiddling their thumbs. Then they were able to go back to work. Then they HAD to go back to work as one income became insufficient to support the middle class lifestyle.
4. Domestic labor is a confounding factor. In the US house servants (maids, etc.) all but disappeared by the 1980s. The process started in the 1930s. Think of it this way. Washing machines and vacuum cleaners are potential labor savers. But when it is a servant's labor being saved, the middle class employer pays them less. There is no longer enough work in a single house to support a servant. So they move out, buy a car (or move further out along the subway) and work multiple households. There's still not enough work to support the entire older servant class, so many of them move to other work, increasing competition in those areas. Some manage to bootstrap themselves into the middle class and compete with their former employers. Can you say "systems effects?"
5. What about the future? What can we predict. How about the title of a recent book, "3 billion new capitalists."

Broadly, the labor savings of a given technology can be cashed out as either leisure or as greater efficiency by each recipient of the savings. So long as there is somebody hungry enough to pick the latter option (be it out of work servants or nation-rebuilding Japanese looking to break into the US market), those who choose the former option will be forced to follow. In a way it's a prisoner's dilemma situation. Any player "defecting" by picking productivity over leisure ruins it for everybody.

To protect against systems effects taking away your potential gains, you need to be very clever in designing protection systems for your hard-won leisure. People are recognizing that now and calling it "lifestyle design."