working for the weekend
Exactly one hundred years ago Henry Ford gave his employees both Saturdays and Sundays off and a two-day wedge of weekend freedom, used to pray or party, was born. But has the gig economy, hybrid working and ‘skiveday’ Fridays altered the nature of our leisure time forever?
In 1926, the American industrialist changed the shape of the working week by announcing his factory workers would now do five eight-hour shifts on the production line as opposed to six, with no cut in pay. “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege” Ford wrote and so it came to pass. Now, before we get all misty-eyed at the social philanthropy of the guy, the employment innovation was in part a response to an exhausted workforce where 10% absenteeism and sickness was the norm, and in more part to the fact that increased leisure time would automatically create the need for more transportation in vehicles!
Before industrialisation there was little concept of leisure as animals and crops could not be neglected for any length of time. Work was dictated by the weather and the seasons, the tick of the clock mattering less than the sun. The whistles and watches of the factory foremen changed all that but the reality has never been so clean-cut. Weekends are naughty and nice, with bad behaviour coexisting with Sunday best: shopping sprees, drinking binges, late nights and lie-ins with parkrun penance and DIY deliverance.
The weekend feels like a cornerstone of democratic civilisation because it releases the majority from following orders. However, ‘time owners’ – largely white-collar knowledge workers increasingly choose when and where they work, whereas the ‘time slaves’ of Amazon, Deliveroo, care homes and hospitality remain stubbornly tied to the clock and shift pattern. For the former, Friday is the corporate open-secret of a half-day: the calendar’s open but the brain’s doing life-admin and planning the fun ahead. In 2024, TfL ran a three-month trial scrapping peak fares on Fridays explicitly to lure commuters back to the office. Needless to say, it failed miserably. Or happily! Mind, time-owners don’t have it all their own way and the mission creep of 24/7 contact-ability is an on-going reality.
Perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much. The puritanical Victorians fretted that workers would waste their precious leisure days comatose in the local tavern. Mid-century society feared television was keeping families indoors. Today’s concern is that we spend Saturday doom-scrolling and Sunday answering emails and returning messages. Rituals change. Henry Ford understood his grafting employees needed some downtime and the weekend remains the best thing work ever invented.
