Why do we work Monday to Friday? We work Monday to Friday with Saturday and Sunday off because of trade unions and because of Henry Ford, but he was improving on systems that had started earlier in the previous century.
The idea of having Saturday and Sunday as a holiday is a relatively recent invention. Although, a lot of you probably also work on the weekends, and we have a lot of people who do shift work, but the idea that Saturday and Sunday should be a day off exists. My brother’s company have a saying on a Friday evening: Friday! Only two more workdays until Monday!
For a large part of human history, there were no words for days. People knew that the days past because it was dark and then light again, and people knew that the seasons changed, but there was no concept of one day being different to another. When people started to think of days individually is unknown, but the Sumerians were the first to give them names. They named them after celestial bodies, and that was about 5,000 years ago. The Babylonians, who came after them, came up with the concept of a seven day week.
Skip forward many centuries and most countries around the world used a seven day week. It came from different places, but seven days was generally common. The majority of people worked the land and crops and animals need to be tended every day, so the days of the week didn’t mean all that much to them. However, when Christianity took over, Sunday became known as the holy day and was the day to worship. This started when Emperor Constantine declared it a day of rest in 321 AD. Sunday was supposed to be the day that Christ was resurrected, so Christians used that day to worship. Every other day they worked.
Things began to change with the Industrial Revolution. New machines needed more people to run them. Spinning cotton and weaving were too of the new jobs. People used to spin and weave in their houses, but inventions like the spinning jenny, and then steam powered looms, made it more economical for people to work in the same building. People who worked in these new factories tended to work 12 hour days because that was what they were used to in the fields. You started working when the sun came up and stopped when it went down. It was too expensive or too dangerous to light the factories. By 1845, it became possible to safely light factories and the employers decided to extend the working hours. People usually didn’t have a break and the workers were exhausted. There were more mistakes, more accidents, and the workforce were far less productive than when they worked fewer hours. The workers also didn’t like it and there were several protests.
The length of a working day began to decline, but people still worked six days a week. Sunday was the only day off and it was meant for going to church. There was very little leisure time. The length of the workday was brought down to ten hours, and workers were given breaks and lunch breaks, but workers wanted it to be brought down to 8 hours. It took a long time, but by the end of the First World War, the working day was mostly eight hours, which is generally where it is today.
So, where did the Saturday holiday come from? In the UK, there was a tradition of not working on a Monday. In the middle of the 19th century, the working week was from Monday to Saturday, with Sunday the day to go to church. A lot of workers would go out drinking on the Saturday evening, drink through the Sunday, and be far too much the worse for wear to go to work on the Monday. It became tradition for workers to take the Monday off as an unofficial holiday. This day became known as Saint Monday. After roughly 1880, trade unions began to gain more power and they pushed for a more regulated work week with an official holiday, rather than the unofficial Saint Monday. The temperance society was also trying to find a way to stop people drinking so much. By the end of the 19th century, many factories gave their workers half of a Saturday off and some gave them the whole day off. There was a move away from Monday to Saturday.
In America, the five day work week is accredited to Henry Ford. In 1926, he realized several things. His workers were more productive if he gave them a holiday. A lot of Jewish immigrants worked in the factories and they needed the Sabbath off. If he gave people a day off, they came back more refreshed. And, probably the most important of all, if his workers had more free time, they wanted to go places, which meant they were more likely to buy his cars. He wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his own heart. And, just like his production line, whatever Henry Ford did, tended to be picked up by other companies as well. By the early 1930s, most companies had a five day work week. And this is what I learned today.
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Sources
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phenomenon-of-the-weekend
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/06/workers-playtime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend
Photo by Bich Tran: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-black-weekly-planner-on-gray-surface-1059383/