Weekend

History of the Weekend

The origins of the weekend lie in early-19th-century Great Britain. Religious reformers were particularly active in promoting free Saturday afternoons as a way of shifting shopping and household chores into Saturday and thus securing Sunday for religious observance. They were joined by reformers hoping to promote domesticity and family togetherness among the working class. The promotion of the Saturday half-holiday often combined with calls for Sunday shop closings, both to allow retail workers Sunday free time and to discourage shopping as a Sunday activity.

Well into the 20th century, workers' movements for shorter hours usually focused on limiting the working day rather than on securing continuous blocks of leisure, reflecting the strain that 10- to 12-hour days put on workers and their families. Union demands began to incorporate the two-day weekend only after daily hours decreased and after workers' incomes as well as the growing offerings of the leisure industry permitted a greater variety of entertainments and thus increased the attractiveness of longer periods of free time. A few employers, too, saw weekend leisure as a potential stimulus for greater consumption as well as greater efficiency; employing such logic, in 1926 Henry Ford (who was no friend to labor unions) implemented the five-day week at his factories. Overall, however, workers on a five-day week remained a small minority. Employers continued to resist efforts to cut back hours, while the labor movement neither in the United States nor in Europe made the two-day weekend a priority issue.

Only in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, as Keynesian ideas of the need for greater consumption (and greater leisure to consume) spread among both workers and employers, did the 40-hour, five-day week achieve a status as a basic standard. In the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 mandated a 40-hour week; though it said nothing about the distribution of those hours, in practice it regularized the two-day weekend. In Europe, the adoption of the weekend was more spotty, with significant groups of workers achieving it only in the 1960s.

Despite the recent vintage of the weekend, by the turn of the 21st century, the concept was nearly universal. Although exact comparisons are difficult because of variations in data, most workers in Japan, for instance, had two-day weekends by the 1990s, whereas less than a quarter of Chinese workers currently work on the weekends. At the same time, free weekends never extended to all workers, and demand for evening and weekend work has increased in recent decades. Americans as well as Europeans now fairly commonly work during the weekend, with figures ranging from a low of a little more than a tenth for Belgian workers to a high of over a third for Italian workers. As one might expect, workers in the retail, entertainment, and service industries are the ones most likely to work during the weekend.

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