As the two-day weekend turns 100 years old, some say it’s high time for a calendar shakeup. 

“Almost nobody alive remembers the time before we had a five-day week and a two-day weekend,” said Grace Tallon, co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a Toronto-based consultancy group that helps employers adopt shorter work hours.

Labour historians and advocates for workweek reform point out that much has changed since the two-day weekend became standard about a century ago, depending on where you are in the world.

Tallon notes that only 20 per cent of women were in the workforce at that time. “Now we have mostly dual-income households, yet we still have a situation where we have a five-day workweek that doesn’t serve really any family.”

Experts also point out that the weekend is a human-made concept that has evolved before and can evolve again.

Grace Tallon, co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a Toronto-based consultancy group that helps employers adopt shorter work hours, says the way we live and work has changed a lot since we last revisited the length of the workweek. (Submitted by Grace Tallon)

How the two-day weekend came about

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a long workweek was the norm.

“Basically, if you were working for wages, the regular work week was six days of 10 hours a day,” said labour historian Craig Heron, a professor emeritus at York University in Toronto. 

“The beginning of the weekend was the Sunday that everyone got off for religious reasons,” Heron told Cost of Living host Paul Haavardsrud.

Though Henry Ford is widely credited with instituting a two-day weekend, there’s quite a bit more to the story, including decades of work by the labour movement.

Prior to Ford’s five-day-week, small groups of workers had achieved similar reforms.

“The most famous group were the printers,” Heron said. “They managed to get an eight-hour day by about 1910.”

An illustration published in the Canadian Illustrated News shows workers taking part in a Nine-Hour Movement march in Hamilton, Ont., in 1872. The movement pushed for shorter working days and helped spur major changes to Canadian labour law. (Canadian Illustrated News/Library and Archives Canada)

When Ford announced in October 1926 that his factories would move to a five-day week, the company became the first major U.S. employer to do so. 

That same month, the American Federation of Labor passed a resolution at its annual congress calling for a five-day week, Heron says.

But it would be a while until the two-day weekend was broadly adopted, including in Canada, he says.

Many workplaces in North America and elsewhere first reduced Saturday work to half a day.

The labour movement grew stronger in the 1940s as the Second World War drove demand for workers, giving unions greater leverage to win shorter workdays through major strikes, he says. 

Governments began to take note and legislate accordingly.

In workplaces that adopted policies that reduce hours while maintaining pay through pilots run by the non-profit 4-Day Week Global, participants reported an improvement in their ability to combine paid work with their social lives. (Tint Media/Shutterstock)

Work has changed

Since then, the nature of work has changed significantly, in ways that can affect whether a two-day weekend feels adequate. 

“We have a much more fluid kind of work schedule for a lot of people who work electronically, who work at all hours, all times of the day or week, and can be on call anytime,” said Heron. “Their cell phone could ring whenever their employer wants them.”

While working hours steadily decreased from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, they began to increase again after that, says David Henkin, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are. 

The erosion of boundaries between work and personal time has not only increased the amount of work that people do, he says, it has also “decreased the amount of insulation, psychic insulation, that people have from work.”

When every weekend is a long weekend

A desire to address that erosion is part of what’s fuelling momentum for a four-day workweek.

Tallon is also a former executive director of the non-profit 4-Day Week Global, which conducted four-day-week pilots starting in 2022, in which hours were reduced while pay remained the same. She says all 41 participating companies in Canada and the U.S. kept the four-day week after the six-month trials ended.

One of them was Praxis, a public relations firm in Toronto.

Meredith Nebel, an account director for public relations firm Praxis, says that since the company moved to a four-day week she’s been able to keep her weekends more free for family time because she can get errands, chores and appointments out of the way on Fridays. (Submitted by Meredith Nebel)

Meredith Nebel, an account director for Praxis, says days off are staggered. Colleagues cover her work while she’s off on Fridays, “and then I take on their Monday work just to make sure that there’s no pause in the workflow.” 

Nebel says she doesn’t think she could go back to a five-day week. 

“I have more time with my kids. I have time within my own community. I have more time for my own life and my own desires and just building myself as a human,” she said.

Nebel says she uses Fridays to get appointments, household errands and chores out of the way so weekends are free for family time and kids’ activities.

Charles Latimer, who works for Greenpeace, says having Fridays off since the organization adopted a four-day week has given him time to volunteer.

“I just started a little kids’ basketball program after daycare on Tuesdays,” said Latimer, who works remotely from Lund, B.C., about 200 kilometres north of Vancouver.

On Fridays Latimer takes care of administrative tasks for the program and also keeps his four-year-old home from daycare, he says.

Charles Latimer, seen here with his four-year-old daughter and their dog, works as head of strategic integration for Greenpeace, which reduced hours to a four-day schedule. (Submitted by Charles Latimer)

Consultant Grace Tallon says switching to a four-day schedule takes considerable planning. “That could mean that you need to restructure your meetings; that could mean that you need to ensure that everybody has heads-down time, when that previously wasn’t respected.”

At Praxis, Nebel says it hasn’t been a struggle to get the work done in less time.

“Work just seems to expand to fill the time that you give it,” she said, “but with the four days there’s a natural urgency so we plan more deliberately and we’re sharper about what actually needs to get done.”

‘The week is unnatural’

We tend to think of the week — with its five days of work and two of rest — as set in stone.

But Henkin says the very idea of the week as a whole, let alone the way we divide it, is considerably more arbitrary than the other units humans use to measure time. 

“The week is unnatural because it is not actually rooted in any of either the astronomical phenomena that produce things like days or … hours or years, nor are they rooted in the biological rhythms that produce patterns of day and night.”

Tallon says that whether a workplace is looking to adopt a four-day week or just rein in long hours, it’s about “how you start to respect your own time and how the company starts to respect your time.”

“And many of these people then feel, ‘I can turn off my notifications in the evening. I’m not gonna look [because] I feel I have to. Because nothing’s going to blow up or burn down.'”