What happened to the 4 day week?

Business Unusual

It looks like only some will get to enjoy it.

Even if you enjoy your work, there are few who don’t appreciate the time away from work to enjoy the fruits of your labour with family and friends.

This is what weekends are for, it is as timeless as the commandment to rest on the Sabbath, so a hat tip to the faithful for getting us our first day off.

The second day required a few thousand more years. Farmers worked during the day, the “early to bed early to rise” wisdom comes from the farm, no holidays until the crops are harvested, then the mother of all feasts and a few days to recover before starting all over again.

The weekend is such a new concept actually that even the French, who typically will not use English words accept ‘le weekend’ even if the official term is French for ‘the end of the week’.

It was fed up factory workers in the UK that convinced owners to give them a Saturday afternoon off probably because productivity dropped anyway and not paying someone when they were not working too hard actually made business sense, even if it was the exploitative kind. Still it was 1879 with the 1st Industrial Revolution in full swing that the word first appeared in print.

142 years later and we are starting to talk about making the weekend almost as long as the week.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Audio credit: Andrew Barnes TEDx Talks

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